


Journey's Damnation

by mary_pseud



Series: Damnatio Memoriae [22]
Category: Doctor Who
Genre: Episode AU: s04e13 Journey's End, F/M, Gen, Metacrisis, Parallel Universes, Planetary Destruction, TARDIS - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-21
Updated: 2020-06-21
Packaged: 2021-03-04 09:54:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 10
Words: 24,505
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24847867
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mary_pseud/pseuds/mary_pseud
Summary: Davros has captured the Doctor and his companions, which draws the attention of the Eternals.  Can these powerful beings stop the universe from being destroyed – and if so, what will it cost the Doctor and his companions?  AU for 'Journey's End.'
Relationships: Tenth Doctor & Donna Noble, Tenth Doctor & Rose Tyler, implied Davros/Donna Noble
Series: Damnatio Memoriae [22]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/91891
Kudos: 3





	1. Interruptions

Davros gloated. If he had a heart, it would have been brimming over with the joy of revenge; as it was the mechanical device that had replaced that organ ran faster.

His greatest enemy, the Doctor, was helpless before him. His companions as well, just as Dalek Caan has predicted: even Sarah Jane Smith. She had been there for the beginning; it was only fitting that she attend on the Daleks' greatest victory. The TARDIS had been destroyed, and more: the Doctor's faith had been crushed as well, as Davros revealed to him the black consequences of his own manipulations.

Outside his Crucible (he thought of the spacecraft as his, even as one tiny analytical portion of his mind noted that he was not its current master; that it was a Dalek ship, and Davros was present only to guide them), twenty-seven kidnapped planets hung in unnatural alignment, to channel the energies of the Reality Bomb and obliterate the universe.

The intercom crackled, "Countdown to commence in...in...in..." The Supreme Dalek's mechanical voice stuttered, then firmed. "Intruder alert. Intruder alert! Activate ... defences ... rrrrr....."

The Doctor quickly tried to think of Things That Would Make The Supreme Dalek Go Rrrrr, and none of the possibilities he came up with were good.

"What? You must start the countdown! Obey me!" Davros shrieked, and his shriek was met with the sound of tearing metal. He turned his eyeless face to the side of the Vault, and the prisoners did as well.

There was something there. Four somethings; four bars of light that seemed to be stuck through the metal wall, like straws piercing a fruit rind. The Doctor had the distinct sensation that the four bars were somehow solider than the wall, harder or realer or ... something.

Then they moved. They cut, four bars of light, white and red and fire-edged black and a fluttering iridescence that combined all three colours; they cut, each moving away from the other, and leaving behind a like-coloured line through which an uncanny white light burned. The bars were moving to form a square now, and the Doctor just had time to register that they were not bars, but some sort of blades, when the cuts in the wall formed a great square which toppled backwards into - nothingness.

But it wasn't nothingness. It was a glowing brightness that seemed to bleed into the darkened room. A strangely complicated light, with flickers of all colours in it, that was blotted out for a moment as a slim figure stepped through.

The Doctor's fascinated gaze was wrenched aside by a movement seen out of the corner of his eye. Davros was obvious taking the position that retreat was the better part of valour, wheeling himself backwards into the shadows. Strange, that all the Daleks were doing the same. There was no noise from the Supreme Dalek over the intercom, only low rasps and creaks that might be the sounds of metal on metal, or of a being driven speechless by fear.

The figure came forward, and was revealed as a man. A man of medium height, with white hair and dark crackling eyes, and a white suit with a distinctly scientific air to it.

"Who is that?" Rose wondered aloud, and flinched as the dark eyes turned to her. Those eyes were - depthless, changing, blurring colours of brown and black and hazel merging and combining; eyes like a boiling sun of darkness.

Beside her, the Doctor smiled. Smiled so wide that his jaw ached. He had never hoped for this but...here he was.

"That, Rose, is proof that even Davros can bite off more than he can chew," the Doctor breathed. "That is the White Guardian."

"The White Guardian?" she asked.

"It must be. One of the Eternals; beings of almost limitless power. I thought they had fled the Time War, but-"

The Guardian paced closer. His quick gaze leaped around the room, seeming to absorb its every angle and contour in an instant, before returning to the prisoners before him.

"The Doctor, of course." The Guardian's voice was a little lighter than the ominous eyes might suggest, with an ironic tinge to it. He paused for a moment, looking the other man up and down. "You know, every time I see you, you've done something even more dreadful to your hair."

"To - to my hair?" the Doctor stuttered. He reached up to try and mash down his flyaway strands.

"Yes, this is even worse than the curls. But perhaps you can help me, Doctor." The Guardian came closer and smiled, friendly little lines forming around his mouth as he did so. "You see, someone or something has been punching holes in the walls between the dimensions."

"Oh. Oh, really?" the Doctor said, trapped. He knew much too keenly that the person who had done some of that punching was currently standing to his left, but telling the Guardian this little fact did not seem like the best plan.

"Very unstable holes," the Guardian said, a touch of menace now creeping into his voice. "Holes that take considerable energy to find and to repair. And there is also the matter of a large quantity of sentient beings that have somehow been dumped into the Howling between. You might say: why does this concern someone from eternity? Well, true, I do not live in reality, but I do enjoy visiting it. And I am not interested in seeing it randomly destroyed, or the barriers that keep it whole corrupted."

In the shadows, Davros' metal fingers flicked again and again at his control panel, urgently trying to summon the Daleks to do battle with the intruder. He had to be exterminated! The Reality Bomb had to be detonated! But even as his fingers moved faster and faster, unease grew somewhere deep in his mind. He had not seen the intruder's face, but his voice...he knew that voice.

"You." This was not addressed to the Doctor. A coloured shadow suddenly formed on each side of the Guardian; one was a billowing mass of infinitely subdivided black spines, shivering and rippling, hovering like a crawling plume of darkness at the Guardian's elbow; the other was a twining red mist whose fine strands looped and coiled around themselves. Both of these - things - felt powerfully alive to the Doctor, but he had no idea what they were.

"Search," the Guardian ordered. The two shadows rippled away, and the Guardian turned on his heel again, examining the prisoners.

They were rising to their feet; Jack in particular was looking rather wide-eyed at the realisation of just what sort of being they faced. Mickey and Jackie just looked confused, Martha was cold and determined as ever, and Sarah Jane looked on the point of snapping.

"An interesting lot of companions, Doctor," the Guardian finally said. Then his attention was drawn to the massive bank of controls that dominated the room, and he went to it, running his hands over the knobs and metal keys with easy familiarity. He leaned forward and seemed to slip his face into the machine, passing through the metal like it was a ghost.

Jack immediately tucked his head back and stopped moving towards the stranger to introduce himself; his experience had taught him to always keep at least an arms-length away from beings that could phase through matter. You never knew when they would reach inside you and start stirring things up.

The Guardian straightened, and a truly ferocious frown took over his face.

"This is linked to a matter destruction bomb," he said, every word bitten off. "And it has trans-dimensional capabilities. With the proper foci, it could destroy all of every reality!"

"No." That from Davros, who suddenly emerged from the shadows, his support chair gliding forward bearing his withered body. His voice shook with emotion: hatred smothering up fear. "No, that is not your face. That cannot be your face!"

The Doctor's eyes darted between the two not-men, monster and Eternal, wondering if they would attack each other on the spot. Mickey looked like he might be rooting for that to happen.

"Well now!" The Guardian looked down at Davros with an expression of amused benevolence. "So, it's you. That explains much."

"You have not explained why you are wearing that face!" Davros snapped. His fingers had stopped picking at his controls; instead his hand waited on the instrument board, a little poised, as though it could somehow strike.

"No? Well, perhaps I could tell you a little story." The Guardian smiled, his teeth shining as white as his clothing and hair.

Far above this conversation, the Supreme Dalek sat alone and quivered, and listened. The other Daleks were spiralling irregularly around the floor before it, helpless in the great flood of data and information that was pouring into their deepest, most central circuitry and chemical programming. What was down in the Vault was overwhelming and terrifying and horrible and wonderful, and the Daleks who had not already fled into space listened as the one called the Guardian spoke.

"Once upon a time - isn't that a nice way to start a story? Well, once upon a time, there was a scientist named - Davros. He was born in a bad time, during a mad war, and it's no secret that he was mad and bad as well."

Davros seemed to sink in his chair. "Continue," he growled, enduring the insult. The longer the intruder kept speaking, the more chances for the Daleks to come to their senses and attack.

"He was a scientist, the greatest scientist of all time." The Guardian's eyes grew misty for a moment. "He saw the future of his war-ravaged planet: saw that Skaro would soon become a wasteland inhabited only by the mutated fragments of his race. And he planned to take control of those fragments; brainwash and enslave them, install them in carrier machines of incredible power, and use them to end the war and rule his planet." The Guardian smiled thinly. "And he succeeded. More: he found a way to transfer his intelligence, his mind, out of a body that had nearly been destroyed in an enemy attack, into a new and healthy body."

"What?" the Doctor and Davros said as one.

"And it was after this transfer that Davros started to have the most incredibly annoying troubles with…time travellers."

The Doctor's lips curled back in a flinch.

"What do you mean, troubles? I remember-" but Davros was interrupted by a wave of the Guardian's hand.

"Oh, all sorts of troubles. Some people came to assassinate him, some came to join him, some came to hire him - to hire him! Imagine that!" The Guardian bristled with indignation. "To hire the greatest scientist in the Universe: to try and buy the priceless labours of his matchless mind with money." He repeated the word with a weight of awesome contempt on it. "Money."

"But Davros noticed something about these time travellers. They were looking for him as he had been: a cripple confined to a support chair. He deduced that these time travellers were coming from alternative futures - or pasts. That they were looking for the man in the chair, not Davros as he was now. So - he cloned himself."

"He cloned himself." Davros' voice was flat.

"And then he took that clone," the Guardian leaned close, and his voice grew softer, "and he artificially aged it. And he burnt it, scarred it, maimed it, smashed and crushed and tore-"

"No," Davros breathed, but the Guardian's voice rolled on relentlessly.

"He destroyed that clone and yet kept it alive, barely alive! Alive in his own support chair, implanted with a suitably edited version of his own memories and a slightly retarded intellect."

"Retarded?" Davros said, his voice going from his usual mechanical rasp to almost a squeak.

"He wanted a decoy, not competition." The Guardian stood very straight now, and he seemed to gloat at Davros' obvious distress. "And then he set the clone to work in his own Bunker, and before you know it, poof!"

"Poof?" Rose wondered, and glanced at the Doctor's face; the grief and fear she saw there froze her down to the bottom of her heart.

"Poof, it was gone! Abducted by time travellers! They dragged it away, leaving the real Davros free and undisturbed to continue with his work. Great works."

The Guardian tilted his head and smiled. "And so that's the story of why you are not Davros. You are instead a replica, a fragment, a copy of the real thing - how else to explain how you could be thwarted again and again by one mere rebellious infant, this Time Lord?" He gestured to the Doctor.

"You are not Davros. You are at best half of him. If that. Perhaps we could call you Dav."

"And then what happened to the real Davros?" the Doctor said, his voice flat with futility.

"He is here," the man in white smiled, glowing. "I am Davros. Davros, the Eternal."


	2. Revelations

The Crucible seemed to shudder with those words, or maybe it was just the Doctor shaking. Because he had suddenly realised the truth: the other man's nose, the line of his jawbone - he had seen them before, but old and twisted and - no. No, it could not be, if there was anything more obscene and blasphemous than this he could not imagine it. Davros the mass murderer, the manipulator, the destroyer of life, with the powers of an Eternal? It made his eyes sting with fury, and more: with a totally irrational urge to kill, to destroy.

In the background, the shattered remains of Dalek Caan wailed from the cup of its casing. "I - I cannot see! I cannot see!" It writhed its tentacles in something approaching ecstasy. "I - am - blind - at - last!"

The two strange living shadows returned, and hovered beside Davros.

"No sign of transdimensional equipment," one spoke, in a clipped voice.

Sarah Jane inhaled in almost a sob.

"And this is a Dalek ship," the black shadow continued, drifting towards Sarah Jane. It seemed to be looking at her, even though it had no eyes or face.

Then it did have eyes and a face. It congealed, into a man with a black uniform, black gloves and boots and jodhpurs and jacket, and a thin pale face and curious eyes behind rimless glasses-

Sarah Jane screamed, a shriek that seemed to tear its way out of her throat. Jack and Mickey lunged and then froze as the man in black seemed to blur, great sharp spines or quills rising out of his flesh like a barrier of thorns or wings of ebon steel.

Davros swerved on his heel and threw his arms wide (one arm went right through the red smoky entity, which made an apologetic coughing noise). "I'd know that scream anywhere," he said, happily walking over to stare at her as though she were a particularly interesting laboratory specimen. "Sarah Jane Smith, we meet again."

"Get away from me," she said, eyes too wide. "Both of you."

"How long has it been?" said the man in black, his form contracting back to - oh no, the Doctor realised who it was. It was Commander Nyder, Davros' second in command. He had seen the man die, burnt down by the Daleks - but then, he thought he had seen Davros die as well.

"Not long enough," Sarah Jane retorted.

The Doctor touched his tongue to his upper lip, his eyes darting between his companions, wondering: was there any way to destroy the Reality Bomb, or cripple it beyond its ability to function, now that the Daleks had crept away and left them here. But then - he blanched - wouldn't that leave the dozens of captive planets stranded? It seemed unlikely that the equipment had been designed to just have the planets be put back into their proper orbits if it was turned off, after all. Jack cut his eyes at the control panel, and the Doctor nodded, slightly; Jack responded by starting to work his way back into the shadows.

Right now, though, the Doctor had to distract Davros from Sarah Jane; she looked ready to pop.

"It's me you want, not her!" he shouted, touching his hand to the containment field around him and making it flare with blue sparks. The red smoke billowed in front of him, and then congealed into another figure.

A man in a long red robe with epaulets and shoulder pockets (sort of a cross between a cassock and a uniform), and a red sash and headband woven with little red hexagons all through the material. The face was young and eerily calm, light brown hair and high cheekbones and - and -

And he would know this man, if he were wearing a blue uniform instead of a red robe. The smile was the same, just not as crazed. He had met him. On Skaro. Long ago...

The Doctor nearly swallowed his tongue.

The robed man looked at him and arched an eyebrow. "No greeting for an old acquaintance?" he asked in a nasal voice.

"You know all of them?" Rose said dubiously.

"This - is - another associate of Davros'. Ah, that man over there with the glasses is Commander Nyder, and this is General Ravon-"

"Please, just Ravon," he said, waving a languid hand that seemed to leave a red flickering shadow behind it. "Eternals need no titles."

"You're an Eternal too? How? I mean this is all ridiculous, it makes no sense! You can't make an Eternal out of an Ephemeral, any more than you can turn sound into fluid, I mean, I mean-"

Ravon smiled, his eyes narrowing. "You mean that the Time Lords never did it, therefore it's impossible. But I'm not a Time Lord."

"What are you?" Rose said.

"The closest thing to a god you'll ever meet," he said with a self-satisfied air, and then frowned at her. "Or maybe not..."

The Doctor had to keep Rose away from them. If they found out that she had been travelling between dimensions, they might do anything. Davros had sounded - very angry.

* * *

Far away in space, another angry man was waiting. A man who was the Doctor in mind if not in flesh watched from the battle-scarred TARDIS, with a very confused Donna Noble at his side. At his other side, he clutched a - a tool, a weapon, not a gun, no surely not a gun - that would wipe out the Daleks forever.

"Why aren't they energising the alignment array?" he wondered aloud. "I mean, what are they waiting for?"

"Yeah, and what are we waiting for?" Donna asked.

* * *

"Ravon, did you find anything?" Davros asked.

"A warpstar."

"Really? You mean in a containment field?"

"In a piece of jewellery, actually. Very pretty. But no transdimensional equipment."

"Still, these are the people who are most likely to have done this damage to the walls around the Howling." Davros' mouth thinned. "The Doctor's companions are always extraordinary. But it should be easy enough to spot; whichever one of them is contaminated with extra-dimensional energy is-"

Davros' eyes started to glow; not his pupils, but the whites seemed to burn, as did those of the other Eternals. The humans and the Doctor could feel those gazes physically sliding over them, looking for-

"Me." Mickey Smith stepped forward; face set and determined, hands a little out from his sides. "I'm the one who was crossin' the dimensions, looking for the Doctor. We needed him."

Davros' eyes narrowed.

"And yet you are not the only one contaminated," he said softly. His eyes darted to Jackie and Rose, and then returned to Mickey.

"Yeah, well, these ladies here are with me," he said. "But I'm the one who did it. I mean, I knew that it was causing damage, but I didn't know...I didn't know..."

Mickey stuttered to silence, because Davros had come and stood very close to him. Close enough that the unnatural heat of his body could be felt through Mickey's heavy clothes; close enough to see that the churning colours of his eyes seemed to be rising out of some bottomless pit of blackness.

"You are not familiar with Eternals, I take it," Davros finally said.

"Can't say that I am," Mickey gibed, and Rose felt a little sting of sweetness in her heart. He was so brave: even though his hands were shaking with tension, his gaze was rock-steady.

"We are very powerful, and sometimes very - whimsical. And we read minds."

"Oh." Mickey did not physically slump, but his tone suddenly weakened.

"And you are not the one who broke the walls between the dimensions."

Mickey said nothing, keeping his eyes from turning to Rose.

Davros smiled, softly. "But it was very brave of you to say so." And with the most natural gesture in the world, he took Mickey's hand in his and squeezed it. Martha flinched, watching: she could actually see the glow of Davros' flesh through Mickey's skin. She wondered if he would have radiation burns, sooner rather than later.

But he didn't look hurt. He looked - blessed.

"No, Doctor," Davros turned on his heel and stepped towards the Time Lord, white hair seeming to crackle, his eyes fixed on the woman pinned beside him. Ravon and Nyder followed, one to each side of Davros, their attention equally focused. "No, the one that I am seeking is-"

The impossible interrupted him. An impossible noise, a whooping groan, the sound of a machine that had been destroyed. A breeze fluttered suddenly, and the oil-saturated air of the Vault seemed to crackle with ozone. They all turned, even neglected Dav in his chair, as a tall blue box materialised by the control panel.

"The TARDIS!" Davros actually beamed, his glow turning up several notches. "Oh, it is so good to see you!"

The door of the TARDIS opened, and another impossibility stepped out. It was - it was the Doctor. Same face, same hair, but a different suit, blue rather than brown. The Doctor shivered; this must be some paradox, deadly dangerous. Had he - already been here, and forgotten? Had he ever had so mad a face?

The blue-suited Doctor took three fast steps out of the TARDIS and then froze, his eyes widening even further, the gun-like object in his hands suddenly hanging limp. Then his mouth firmed, and he brought the weapon up.

"Enough!" The man who had thought he was Davros had lost all his weapons: his bomb was apparently never going to be set off, his Daleks cringed in the corners and burbled, but he still had one weapon left. He used it.

A line of light shot from Dav's metal hand, lashing into the Doctor in blue, and he collapsed.

"No!" shouted Donna from the door of the TARDIS, leaping out and reaching for the dropped weapon. Dav's second bolt took her just below the heart, and she flew backwards, out of sight behind the control panel.

"Tut-tut!" Davros gestured, and the energies that shot from Dav's hand sputtered into silence. He gestured with his other hand, and the strange weapon rose and disassembled itself, dribbling onto the floor in a pile of components. The second Doctor saw this, and groaned. "So much for interruptions. Now then."

He walked towards Rose, and bumped into the containment field. It crackled blue against him, and he looked upwards with a sour expression. A popping noise, and the barrier vanished. Davros dropped his eyes to Rose, and they were cold eyes, very cold. Nyder and Ravon raked their gazes over the watchers, as though daring them to interfere.

Behind the control panel, Donna was rising to her knees, shuddering, feeling like a great dam had broken in her head and filled her mind with fire. She looked at the control panel and she saw it: saw its function, its purpose, deduced what every lever and knob and Dalek-designed entry key was for, and knew how to manipulate it. She rose to her feet, hands hungry to get to work. So many choices! So many things to do! But as her hands flew, she looked up and saw - strangers? Here? Were they from one of the abducted planets? And how had they got here?

"Oi!" she shouted, her eyes flickering like lightning, taking in the whole room in fits and starts. "Where's the fourth one?"

"The fourth what?" the man in white asked, turning towards Donna.

"Well I mean, here you are, one dressed in red and one black and one white, am I right? And there's that hole there," she freed one hand from its labours just long enough to point at the glowing puncture in the side of the Vault, "your most likely entry point, with four sides: one red, one black, one white and one sort of - multicoloured. So there's three of you and four sides, so where's the fourth one?"

There was a sudden silence, broken only by the sound of Donna's fingers still thundering on the input keys. Then a sound: the soft sound of booted footsteps.

"You are a very impressive woman," said a voice out of nowhere. Another figure in black appeared, moving in quick steps to where Donna stood. It was short, almost stocky, but with a distinctly feminine curve to the hips.

When the figure stopped on the other side of the control panel, it seemed to condense into a woman. She was short and pale, with dark hair that fell straight down over her shoulders. She rather resembled the other strangers: almost certainly the same race. She wore a plain black uniform with a red armband; the uniform's collar bore embroidered hexagons that seemed to bleed redness into the air around them.

She was not beautiful: her face was too serious, her forehead too high, her nose too sharp. But her eyes were endless depths of lacquered darkness, the same eyes that shone in the face of -

Donna stopped, and looked at the people she didn't know, and realised that she knew two of them.

"Ravon. Nyder." She stared at the man in white and said, "And I don't suppose that you're Ronson, and you've just had a face lift."

"No," he answered.

"Gharman, only you've gone all grey - no." Her shoulders slumped as she correlated the angle of jaw, shape of shoulders, tone of voice; compared them to millions upon millions of people and matched them to one. "Davros."

"I'm still impressed," the woman said. "To deduce my presence, to recognise Davros ... you are more than just a companion."

"You!"

The woman looked down at Dav, who had just wheeled himself to her elbow.

"A Kaled female. A female!" Dav was focused totally on her; the lines of her face and body were so familiar, even though he had never seen her before. She was a woman of his species, at last. And she looked perfect, without deformity. Perhaps she was from a time before war had poisoned Skaro and all its inhabitants. In his mind he was already sectioning her ovaries, preparing a new and complete DNA extraction, creating a new race of Daleks more perfect and controllable than ever. But first -

"Strip," he ordered. "I wish to examine you."

She turned away from Donna and the console, putting her black-gloved hands behind her back. She stared down at the battered remains of a man before her, and then cut her eyes at Davros.

"He's got your bedside manner," she murmured, and her clothes vanished.

The Doctor had the strange impression that her clothes had somehow parted at the seams and flown backwards, hiding behind her. Whatever the method of her stripping, however, the body revealed was quite well-constructed from a strictly aesthetic point of view. She was not stocky; she was just firmly built, muscles round in her arms and legs, her torso solid. The body of an athlete or a soldier.

Jack and Mickey had been helping the second Doctor to his feet; they paused and stared with extremely interested expressions. From their vantage point, it was clear that this woman had some of her best assets behind her, to coin a phrase.

"Perfect," Dav whispered, moving towards her. He raised his metal hand as though to touch one small pink-nippled breast, and then dropped it.

"Thank you," she said, raising and crossing her arms with a casual air. She gave no sign that she was shielding herself from his gaze; if anything she seemed amused by his attention.

"What are those marks on your arm?"

She looked down at her right arm, which was striated with pale marks that were almost luminescent against her skin. "Those? Burns from a Dalek gun, coincidentally enough. It was not at full power of course-"

Dav ignored the impossibility of a Dalek shooting someone non-fatally. "Why do those scars glow?"

"Scars?" She turned her head a little to one side. "I'm sorry, did you think this was my body that you were looking at?"

The marks on her arm started to glow brighter. "That this was flesh and blood and bone? That I was a woman?"

The glow suddenly ramped up, enveloping her in fire, burning like white-hot coals, searing her shape into the air, and her words were a bellow of flame as well. "BECAUSE I AM NONE OF THOSE THINGS. I AM AN ETERNAL, AND IF I WERE TO BRING ONE THOUSANDTH OF MY GLORY INTO THIS VESSEL I SHOULD BURN YOU ALL INTO LESS THAN DUST!"

The glow faded, burning down into her arm, and the woman's clothes reappeared. She winked at Dav, ignored the awed expressions of the watching humans.

"You know," she said familiarly, leaning closer to him, "I was part of the surgical team that - restructured - several of the Davros clones. Perhaps-"

"Clones? Plural?"

"Of course, no point in having just one when they kept being abducted. Perhaps I'm the one who removed your legs." She smiled at his wordless fury. "Or burnt out your eyes. Or snipped off your-"

"Esselle." This from Davros, and the woman stood straight and turned to him.

"Your orders?" she asked.

"We will be scanning this volume of space to determine how much damage has been done. You will assist with neutralising the Reality Bomb," he ordered, and Esselle nodded and went to the control panel. Her fingers danced over the keys, and then slowed.

"You are almost halfway there," she said in surprise. "But - you have never seen this equipment before."

"Nope," Donna said, raising her head and aiming a rather manic smile at her. "It just came to me."

"You - have you always been like this?"

"Nope again," Donna said, and laughed. "But it feels great!"

"It doesn't seem - quite stable, though. Davros."

"Hmm?" Davros said, his eyes darting between Rose and Sarah Jane.

"Please come look at this one's brain."

Donna watched him turn and come towards her as though through some terrible thick liquid. Her mind was moving so quickly: could she drop a containment field around him? No, he'd break it at once. Her fingers leaped to another part of the panel, and with a few quick passes turned off the containment field that held the Doctor. Because she didn't have much time. The man in white was coming, Davros, his face was coming closer, his eyes, great dark eyes. He looked - so much younger than she had ever seen him. Whole and young.

Her arms seemed to be a thousand miles long now, her fingers moving fumblingly on the horizon, but she forced them on. She had to completely disable the bomb, wind its code into such knots that the Daleks would never unwind it. She had to ... had to...

"Hello," said Davros, his face filling the world. "I don't believe we've been introduced."

"Donna Noble," she said, dazzled.

"Donna Noble," he replied, his lips lingering on the words. "Truly named."

The Doctor had gone to his double, and after a brief and rather horrific exchange of information (the words "metacrisis" and "Eternals" figured prominently in the conversation), he was now trying to work his way around the other side of the panel, to stand by Donna. If he could grab her, get them all into the TARDIS...but then he recalled that Eternals could certainly remove the TARDIS from his control.

Davros' eyes went from Donna to the Doctor, and then back. Then again back and forth, and he was growling, a deep rumbling noise that seemed to come from the bottom of his chest and vibrate in the back teeth of everyone in the room.

"What?" said Nyder and Ravon at one, snapping to attention.

"No," said Esselle, backing away from the three: the Doctor and Davros and Donna, all locked into some strange tense confrontation without words. "No! Get them!"


	3. Wrath

A wave of force swept through the Vault. The room vanished with a blinding glare and a howling burning wind; and the humans, the duplicate Doctor, Dav, Dalek Caan (his chains snapping like pins), and a handful of other Daleks found themselves jumbled and piled and stacked into a translucent force bubble that had materialised at one side of the room.

The noise of their landing was the shattering of a thousand steel skulls. Daleks do not stack very well. The Daleks and Dav were on the lower level, with people draped around and on top of them (Sarah Jane looked down at the hard glowing thing between her legs, and discovered to her horror that she was actually sitting on top of a Dalek, its communicator light glowing as it groaned. She wriggled off, but ended up standing on the Dalek's lower rim; there were no room to go elsewhere).

"Is everyone all right?" Jack said, squeezing out from between two Daleks. He looked up; Nyder and Ravon were levitating in the centre of the sphere, their faces intent and hands stretched outwards.

"Doctor. DOCTOR!" Rose shouted, pounding her hands on the clear bubble; it flushed red and black at her touch. Outside, she could see a boiling white sea of energy that crawled and billowed like the fires of a sun, and through the flames she could see glimpses of people. She turned her head, blonde hair flying, and counted who was in the bubble.

"The Doctor's out there, I think," she said. "And Donna."

"What's going on?" Jack demanded of the floating Eternals. He noticed in passing that Ravon was barefoot under his robes. He had very nicely shaped legs, and - Jack declined to look further, just this once.

Nyder frowned down at them, his eyes glazed with concentration. "What you are seeing around you is the wrath of an Eternal. Davros has lost his temper - you could say, he is exploding with rage. The reason for that anger apparently concerns the Doctor and that Donna woman, because they are out there, and quite unharmed."

Behind the thundering energy waves, the Doctor could be seen, and Donna. And they certainly could see Davros.

Flames were rising from him, flames that glowed but did not consume him; they streamed out like the corona of a sun. The waves of fire seemed to circle around the three figures and the TARDIS without touching them, but the Vault's metal walls and floor were being scoured away, glowing and disintegrating. There was already a noticeable lip at the bottom edge of the shielding sphere, where the deck had been pitted away into nothingness. But the fires and sparks seemed to move at an eerie dragging pace, and when they saw the Doctor shout his mouth moved like a slowed-down film.

"What's - why are they moving at a different time rate?" Sarah Jane asked.

Ravon shot her a glance. "We are moving at a different time rate because Davros' full fury would destroy all of you, and more importantly, the portal back into Eternity."

The humans turned and looked; even the Daleks turned their domes (Jackie and Mickey had to duck as the eyestalks passed through where they were standing). It was true; the bubble that held them also enclosed the glowing square opening into Elsewhere.

"And rebuilding that portal will be a delicate task. Especially from this side. And with the walls between the dimensions already so frayed, this is the best action to take."

"Typical," said Esselle, blinking into existence. She was perching on the edge of Dav's chair; in fact she was probably sitting on his hand, not that she appeared to notice. "We give Davros his feet back, and what does he do? Shoot himself in them."

"That line of humour is not appreciated, Security Liaison," Nyder said in a throttled tone.

Esselle nodded gravely and rose, drifting upwards to hover with her fellow Eternals. Dav's blind face rose to follow her, his mouth a little open. "Understood, sir. Are you sure this is all of them?" She spun in mid-air, looking at them, human and Dalek and other.

She eyed the second Doctor, his wild hair stuck to his forehead with sweat. "I wonder what we should call you. Metacrisis hybrid duplicate seems a bit long. I know; we could call you Fred."

"No, you cannot call me - Fred..." he said, his voice fading away. He frowned, and then said a little too slowly, "Why do I get the feeling you know more about me than you're letting on?"

"Oh, I know all sorts of things about you, Fred," she said, and then her eyes blazed. "Nameless stars! The console's half-slag by now."

They could all see it, slumping and blowing away in a hail of parts and cables and keys.

"Ravon, can you interface with the systems and get those planets back where they belong?" Nyder asked.

"Well, not from in here," Ravon said, touching his headband with one hand; the other was held straight out, palm forward, as though pushing strength into the protective sphere. "And we don't know if the current configuration will be held stable once the equipment is inoperative."

"He cannot do that!" Dav snapped. "You must stop him! He will destroy everything!"

"He'd have to be pretty angry to do that," Esselle said thoughtfully, "but it could happen."

"We don't have time to reminisce," Nyder said. His hands were held out towards the sphere as well, and they were shaking. "Esselle. You will have to translate outside this ship, and return the planets to their proper places."

Esselle looked at him, eyes wide, and the humans stared as well.

"Sir," she said hesitantly, "are you certain-"

"Of course I'm certain," he snapped. "If we are to repair the damage to the various dimensions, we must return this one to its proper balance. All twenty seven planets put back, and scrape any Daleks off them before you move them, please; their satellites and respective systems readjusted, and then return here."

"Y-yes, sir," she said.

"Esselle," Ravon said unexpectedly.

She looked at him, her face full of nervousness and fear.

"Make Davros proud of you," he ordered rather than said.

She smiled, her grave face suddenly alight. For a moment she was beautiful. "Yes!" she said happily, and vanished.

"Why are you sending her?" the second Doctor said, his eyes studying the remaining Eternals.

"She is the strongest," Nyder said. "Two of us are enough for here. Although holding a protective sphere large enough to protect you all is not-"

The outside world went pure white, light blinding them; Nyder and Ravon stiffened, seeming to push back against the light.

"If the size of the sphere is a problem, Eternals, perhaps I can help you reduce it," Dav rasped. "Dalek units. Destroy these humans! Exterminate!"

* * *

In the Vault, Davros was screaming in fury. His every word was accompanied by a new burst of wrathful flame that spat out of him and circled the Doctor like a hungry phoenix. The smell of boiling metal and seared circuitry was thick in the room, but the flames were burning the smoke out of the atmosphere as fast as they created it. This was not much consolation to the Doctor as he fought to hold Davros' attention.

"You closed-minded fool!" Davros roared, flinging one hand to where Donna stood; the flames roiled around and over her but did not touch her dazed face. "How can you even contemplate harming such a spectacular being!"

"I don't know what you're talking about!" the Doctor screamed back. "I-"

"Oh yes you do, Doctor, yes you do! You've done it before, I can see it! I see your past and your now, Doctor, I see it all as clearly as I see your face. And I see the future, Doctor! I see what you are going to do to her! And I will not let it happen!"

"What are you both on about?" Donna finally shouted, and they both turned to her. All three of them were haloed and framed by the corroding flames, like standing in a simulation of Hell that could turn real at any moment.

"Donna, don't listen to him," the Doctor jumped in, trying to talk over Davros, and only too late realised that he had held silent, letting the Doctor put out his blanket denunciation first.

"Donna Noble, look inside yourself," Davros said urgently. She stared at him as he went on, his attention totally focused on her. "You have the Doctor's mind and knowledge, I can see it, a two way metacrisis; you know what you are, you know what he is, and so ask that Doctor within you: what will he do to you?"

"Donna-"

"What will he do?"

Donna's eyes widened, and seemed to bleed golden sparks. "No," she whispered. "No, you can't, damn you, you skinny miserable alien git, YOU CAN'T!"

"I HAVEN'T DONE IT!" he screamed in utter despair.

"But you will," she said, shaking, her eyes starred with tears. "You will. You've done it before. You'll destroy what I am, to save my life - or a life. Not this me, but - a me." The cords stood out in her neck. "And I won't let you. Never!"

"Donna, come with me," Davros said, one hand out, his tone oozing sincerity. A passage opened between him and Donna, roofed over with the inferno. "No matter how long it takes, I can show you how to survive this. Let me teach you, let me help you-"

"NO! Donna, that's Davros, the most evil man in the Universe! You can't possibly trust him!"

"You don't know that I will harm you." Davros tilted his head to one side. "And you do know that he will. There is not much time left for you. So-"

A long silent moment, all three of their faces lit by the boiling flames, tearing at the steel and filling the air with the smell of burning Time.

"Yes," she said, holding out her hands to Davros.

His hands closed over hers, and his face glowed with triumph. "Yes!" he repeated happily, and vanished along with Donna.

The Doctor opened his mouth wide, ready to scream his hearts out with one word: "NOOOOOOOO...."


	4. Renew

"Exterminate! Exterminate! Exterminate!" Dav ordered, gesturing wildly at the terrified humans.

The Daleks did not move. They did not even seem to notice the order.

"Obey me!" Dav shrieked.

"You know what we forgot to put on that chair? A volume control," Ravon muttered to himself.

"Daleks?" Dav asked, tapping one of them with his metal fingers. Tap-tap-tap, but the Dalek did not react.

"What is going on!" he finally wondered aloud.

All of the Daleks were pointing their eyestalks at the portal into Eternity. Finally, one of them turned its dome. Slowly, very slowly, it turned and seemed to focus on its creator.

When the Dalek spoke, its voice was unexpectedly hushed. "There are Daleks in there."

Then it turned its dome away, quicker than a blink, to stare again into the flickering light.

Another Dalek spoke, its voice equally soft. "They are - they are perfect. Perfect Daleks. They are as far above us as we are above all other races. They...we..."

"I, I am - imperfect!" A third Dalek spoke, swivelling to stare at Dav. "I am inferior! I am inferior because I was made by you! A mere copy of the true Davros!"

"No. No, no, no!" Dav raged, but it was too late. All the Daleks turned and joined in the verbal assault.

"We are inferior!"

"We are defective!"

"We must - we must -"

"I must self-exterminate," one of them finally groaned, and levitated upwards (the two Eternals drifted to the sides of the sphere without seeming to notice). "But I have no orders. But I must, I must," it repeated.

"No!" Dav howled, straining upwards with his sole hand. Rose jumped into the opened spot on the deck and grabbed his arm, slamming it down against his chair console. She was close enough to him to smell the rotted medicinal stink of him, close enough to feel his breath on her face, but she did not flinch.

"You'll lose your arm!" she shrilled. "Everyone, get down, get away from it!" She knew what was going to happen next.

The Dalek's spheres separated from its casing, floating outwards to form a globe that crackled with alien energies. The humans desperately scrabbled to keep outside the deadly circle. Then lightning crashed and the Dalek was gone.

A second Dalek began to drift upwards. "I must be exterminated," it moaned.

"Let me off first!" Sarah Jane shouted, wriggling away and landing rather badly on Jackie. They both were driven to their knees. The humans were down on the deck now, watching as one Dalek after another rose and shouted in uttermost despair of its weakness, its flaws, and then died. The light of their passage flickered over Dav's face; he looked like he might cry, if he had eyes.

Throughout the Dalek fleet, the message was spreading. The doomed Daleks in the sphere sent their data as they died, and millions upon millions of Daleks had full knowledge of their utter worthlessness poured into the very core of their minds. And by the millions, they died. Only the strongest, the most determined, the most flexible, could hope to survive that crushing mental blow.

Dalek Caan was wailing thinly, "I cannot - I cannot die! I cannot die!" Its casing was probably too damaged for it to activate the self-destruct.

The humans rose warily to their feet. The Daleks were gone now, except for Caan; but outside the light still writhed and boiled against the walls of the sphere. Jack looked upwards and thought he could see stars; had the hull of the Crucible actually been burnt through? That might be a problem, once this protective sphere and its atmosphere were gone.

"Now what?" Mickey wondered, looking at Dav's chair controls. If it didn't have a mute button, maybe there was an off switch.

"Done, sir," said a weak female voice out of nowhere, and Esselle returned. Or rather, some of her returned.

Jack and Martha shared a look of sudden knowledge. They had seen something like this before: what an immortal being might look like, aged centuries beyond its normal lifespan. Esselle was a withered mannequin of herself, shrunken inside her uniform. Her dark eyes were huge in her face now, and her tiny gloved hands clenched tight to one another. She was visibly shivering.

"Twenty seven planets," she coughed, "are very heavy! I could not draw on Eternity out there. I had to use my personal energies."

"Draw on us, now, that's an order," Nyder snapped. He had not turned to look at her, and neither had Ravon, but it was clear they could sense what sort of a state she was in.

"No, sir," she contradicted him. "The sphere would be breached. But - it is done. The planets returned, and their moons nudged back into place, and their satellites, and the binary systems rebalanced, and all those annoying spaceships that would insist on parking right where the planet was supposed to be shoved aside. It is done."

She turned her head, which looked oversized on her too-thin neck, and gestured with one hand. Out of nowhere, three objects materialised and drifted to Rose, Mickey and Jackie. Two guns, and the dimension cannon.

"These are yours," she rasped. "And for the rest of you, good news. Mr. Harkness: Gwen and Ianto are safe. Tosh's plan worked."

Jack exhaled a breath of fear he didn’t even know he had been holding, then straightened. "How do you know about them - and Tosh?"

She blinked at him, her eyelids translucent. "They are a part of you. I see you, your past and your friends, they are all a part of you. And Tosh - is gone, but her plan did work."

She looked at Sarah Jane. "Luke is all right," and then at Martha. "And your mother is dancing in her garden. And she is beautiful."

Martha smiled, and Esselle tried to smile back; it was more of a rictus. "But I do not know if there is much to dance about. Billions dead-"

"Billions!" Rose exclaimed. "But - that's all the Earth, that's everyone!"

"Billions spread between twenty seven planets," Esselle answered, casting a very cynical look at Rose. "Vehicle crashes, buildings collapsed, sinking ships....fires and floods....volcanoes and earthquakes. Famine and disease to come, changed weather...and madness, terrible madness, for those who have seen the impossible." She wrapped her arms around herself and twitched as if in pain.

The second Doctor stepped up to Rose. "So what happens now?" he said, his fingers slipping onto the dimension cannon almost casually.

"Now we hope that Davros' wrath runs out before our power does...." She drifted backwards through the air, and leaned on Ravon's red-clad shoulder, head drooping, seemingly exhausted.

The second Doctor did not take his eyes from Esselle as he lifted the cannon from Rose's slack grip and opened a control panel on it, quickly popping and resetting a series of micro-switches by touch.

"Isn't there anything we can do for you?" Jackie implored, her knuckles white on her own weapon. Whatever these Eternals were, they had put the Daleks in their place all right; and it was hard not to trust someone who handed you back your gun.

"I - wait, yes. But not you." She turned and stared down at Sarah Jane. "You."

She opened one of the pockets of Ravon's robe, pulling out a long loop of golden chain with a glowing gem suspended from it. She slid the chain across her palms, and then held her hands out.

Her eyes burned in her face like gems, or like the warpstar in her grasp. "You were willing to give this up to defeat the Daleks. Will you give it up to save the life of someone who serves Davros? If I do not absorb energy soon, I will be, well, in a very bad way."

Sarah Jane opened her mouth to answer, and was interrupted.

"I wonder what would happen if I shot a severely weakened Eternal with this," the second Doctor said, swinging the cannon up and aiming it directly at Esselle's wasted form.

The humans flinched, turning to stare at him with disbelief. Dav tilted his head in what might have been approval, or recognition. Nyder and Ravon seemed to stiffen with indignation in midair, but they did not turn round. Jack reached for the barrel and the second Doctor said "Nuh-uh!" and flexed his finger ostentatiously just above the trigger.

"You will not kill me, man who is not quite a Time Lord," Esselle droned. "But you could cripple me past the point of coherent sentience. I, or a part of me, would need to be brought back to Eternity to regenerate, which would take years, centuries even. But so long as the tiniest shard of me was returned to Eternity, I would survive and be reborn. And you would not know about any of it."

"And why not?" he challenged.

"Because if you pull that trigger, my husbands will drop this sphere in their rage, and leap on you to destroy you. The backwash of Davros' wrath will then kill everyone else here, except for you, who will be dying a far slower and more painful death. And the only reason that they do not turn and strike now is that if they did, their faces would turn you all to stone."

The sphere rippled, and suddenly silvered. Reflected in the walls of the sphere, they saw the wrath of Eternals, burning and blinding, turning the faces of Ravon and Nyder into creatures worse than devils: monsters in truth. Their eyes were pits to the bottom of fiery hells, and their features twisted with emotions too great to be expressed.

"So do not shoot me, Fred, if you want to live," she finished.

After a long pause, he took his finger from the trigger. Rose nearly ripped the gun from his hands, turning it over with shaking fingers and pulling the power pack out.

"Sarah Jane?" Esselle stared at her again, the warpstar's chain still draped across her hands. "You realise, this is a matchless opportunity for you, to have me in your debt. I have seen entire civilisations work for centuries just to try to catch the attention of an Eternal. A favour from us is worth - much."

"Luke - Luke is all right?" Sarah Jane asked again.

"He is, but he has eaten all the bananas in the house out of nervousness, and has started in on the prunes." She gave a faint smile. "He's going to regret that tomorrow, I imagine."

Sarah Jane gave half a laugh that was not quite a gasp. "Yes, take it. Please," she said, gesturing.

"How can you absorb-" Jack started to ask, and then stopped in absolute horror. Esselle had simply popped the warpstar into her mouth, and there was the unforgettable sharp crunch of the crystal breaking between her teeth.

She did not explode; instead she darkened, blackness streaking across her face and hands, clotting around her. Then she seemed to swell, and thicken, and fluoresce. Her uniform black as night, her face white as snow, and the only colour her glowing dark-brown eyes and her red insignia. She burned with darkness, her face lit with triumph, restored to herself.

Carefully, gently, she removed the chain from her mouth. She held it out to Sarah Jane; the glitter of the warpstar was gone from the crystal.

"Miss Smith," she said, in a voice that seemed to have the rumble of thunder in it, "I could put a little light in here, but I think it will be far more impressive just as it is. I owe you a very great favour. And if anyone asks you how close you were to the warpstar when it was released, you can say," she reached out with her other hand and brushed Sarah Jane's hair, "this close."

The chain was cool between Sarah Jane's fingers, and she touched the warpstar casing with one finger, feeling it cold as ice.

"Right!" Esselle snapped herself into the air, hovering now behind Ravon and Nyder, one hand planted familiarly in the small of each of their backs. "What's our status?"

"He seems to be winding down," Nyder said tersely.

"Hull is in ribbons, though," Ravon noted. "The TARDIS is intact, but we'll have to hold in the atmosphere and build up a floor if these people are to get to it."

Rose leaned to one side and pressed her forehead to the side of the sphere looking down: she could see deck upon deck punctured below her, the shattered remains of Dalek casings and machines.

Esselle nodded. "Well, as soon as we're ready to go we should."

Nyder turned his face to her, his expression back to its normal mild deadliness. "Why? Davros will probably want to examine the ship, perhaps dissect several of the crew-"

"I had to do something with the residual energy from moving the planets - I couldn't absorb it, it's of this dimension. So it's going to be moving this rather pretty stellar formation back one second in time. Back to its proper place. And that would best be observed from a distance - a great distance."

"So, you are not of this dimension," Dav snarled. "Therefore, you do not know that I am not the true Davros! What if-"

"What if I say a certain fifty-five syllable word that will put that chair into permanent shutdown?"

"You would not dare!"

Esselle just looked at him. Mickey stepped closer, and pointed his gun at Dav's head; if the word wouldn't kill him, Mickey would.


	5. Away

The Doctor's scream of 'NOOOO' was never uttered, because Davros and Donna blinked into existence exactly where they had been. Had they even gone? They must have, they'd turned round; Donna had her back to him now. And there was something different about her. Her clothes had changed, or maybe it was-?

Then she turned round to face him, and he saw how she had changed.

Her face was smooth, barely lined, but her hair was different: two long white locks hung down along the sides of her face. Her expression was clear and untroubled and totally concentrated on him. And her eyes - they were not the eyes of an Eternal, but they were considerably more focused than a human's eyes ought to be.

Davros chuckled at the Doctor's silent shock, and the great glowing flames of his wrath started to cool.

"How-" the Doctor asked.

"Davros estimated it would take me ten years to learn to control my new mind. It took more like seventeen. But I did it." She stood there in front of him, strong and balanced and whole, and smiled a smile of utter and merciless delight; her smile was the brightest thing in the room as the flames faded away to nothing. "And I wouldn't trade one second of it for anything."

The Doctor's eyes ran up and down her - her clothes were worn, that was it. Frayed at the seams, repaired here and there with neat hand stitching. Her arms looked thicker, her shoulders rounder, and her fingers bore strange calluses that were not the result of any Earthly tool.

She was beautiful. She always had been, but the raw beauty of the human in her had been transmuted into something brilliant as ruby glass, and just as sharp if it cut you.

"Right then." Davros waved his hand, and they fell.

"Stop!" he shouted, and the Doctor and Donna stopped falling, and looked down.

Under their feet was a tiny fragment of metal deck, and under that was nothing. Hundreds of metres of nothing, of emptiness: the Crucible had been gutted by Davros' wrath. The Doctor immediately looked at the TARDIS, and saw her hovering serene on her own bit of deck.

"Grow," Davros ordered, and metal tendrils started to sprout out of the remains of the decks below them, meshing and clicking together like a silverware orgy. The metal vines wove themselves between the remaining fragments of floor, forming a barrier between them and space.

"Well come on then!" Davros said; the Doctor turned and saw the extremely startling sight of his companions, alive and surrounded by what looked like a fishbowl. In the centre of the fishbowl were Esselle, Nyder and Ravon, staring.

The fishbowl expanded, its clear wall rippling over them all and outwards.

Davros started giving orders. "Ravon. Find what you can of the computers, I want a data strip."

Ravon gave a short bow, and vanished.

"Nyder. I'm looking for equipment we can salvage-"

"What gives you the right to loot my ship?" Dav spat; his chair was rocking unevenly over the ropy surface of the new floor.

"Because you can't stop me, and your pathetic imitation Daleks are helpless before me and mine."

Nyder faded away after Ravon. The companions were working their way towards the TARDIS; Jack stopped and looked at the hole where the console had been with a wistful expression. To be able to control that sort of power - no. Esselle came pacing among them, heading towards Davros, and was stopped by Donna, who took her by the shoulder, turned her about, and kissed her with deep enthusiasm.

Everyone paused and watched for a startled moment. Esselle's hands hung limp behind Donna's back, then performed an index-finger-up gesture that seemed indicative of victory. Any further hand signals were cut off when Donna broke off the kiss and stood there, smiling down at the Eternal women.

"Ah. Well, that was very nice. Was it for anything in particular?" Esselle asked.

"It's because you'll always be there for me, when I need you."

"I will? Oh. I will. Thank you."

Nyder materialised at Davros' elbow. "This vessel is breaking up, and-"

A shuddering moved through the Vault; it was not a thing of moving air or groaning metal, but a quivering across the vision, a twitching in the muscles.

"- and the readjustment of the stellar formation is beginning," Nyder finished. "All equipment is too damaged to be salvaged, and the Daleks that remain are either mad or dead."

Dalek Caan whistled feebly from the remains of its casing.

"One interesting item, however. The core of this ship is z-neutronium."

"Oooo." Davros' mouth formed a perfect O for a moment. "I do like z-neutronium."

"I know you do, sir," Nyder said, and they looked at each other with a little smile.

Jackie had been watching this entire exchange, and she butted in with, "Are you - flirting with each other?"

Davros looked at Nyder.

Nyder looked at Davros.

They both looked at Jackie, and wiggled their eyebrows in unison.

"Oh," she said. "Well, I'll just give you some privacy then."

She moved away, not at all casually, and Nyder sank down through the repaired deck of the Vault, going to examine the ship's core and determine how to move it.

"You have destroyed me," Dav growled, rolling his chair to confront Davros. "My ship, my Daleks, my empire - gone!"

"Nonsense, nonsense," Davros purred. "I've given you a spectacular chance to start over, with a fresh clean experimental field as it were. You could spend years just reflecting on today's events; years well spent I might add. Of course," Davros tapped his chin with one slim finger, "it might be amusing to give you a little more information, and see what you make of it."

The humans were gathering at the door of the TARDIS, ready to leap inside at the Doctor's word.

"Excuse me for asking," Jack said in the Doctor's ear, with considerable urgency, "but shouldn't we be going now?"

"The TARDIS is badly damaged, Jack. The longer we can stay here and let her circuits recharge, the better. And I'm not all that keen on Davros giving Dav any assistance, for that matter."

"No reason why Dav has to survive that assistance," the second Doctor jibed. "Flick of a switch, and-?" He beamed at the prospect, miming Dav collapsing in his chair by waving his forearm in the air in an arrhythmic shudder.

The Doctor looked at his copy with eyes both furious and sad.

"I could just-" but Davros was interrupted.

"NO!" boomed a voice from above, and a red shape moved overhead, drifting downwards through the crackling remains of the Vault's ceiling. "No, you shall not have him!"

It was the Supreme Dalek. Its eyestalk quivered, but its gun was rock-steady aimed at the glowing figure of the Eternal. Behind it were four other Daleks, twitching. They were the last survivors of the Dalek Fleet, the ones who had monitored the revelations and the wrath of Davros, seen inside the walls of Eternity and come out the other side still sane (or at least as sane as any Dalek could ever be).

"Variant Daleks," Davros said, shaking his head sadly. "I never approved of such things."

"He is ours!" the Supreme Dalek croaked, rolling to place itself between Davros and Dav. "He must rebuild us! He must transform us! We who have seen the perfection of the Dalek race shall remake ourselves in their image!"

Davros looked intrigued. "Well, that should certainly be interesting."

The Daleks crowded close around Dav, surrounding his chair. All that could be seen of him was one metal-clad hand that beat mutely against his captors.

"We go!" the Supreme Dalek ordered, and the Daleks' suction arms lashed out. They ripped great slabs of metal from the floor, wrenching them forward and upwards like a flower closing.

The Supreme Dalek's voice was muffled. "Form the shell! Distribute the shift!" The metal slabs crunched together, forming a flattened sphere that reminded Sarah Jane of a giant clamshell for a single, hilarious, appropriate instant. Then it vanished.

"Damn!" the second Doctor snapped, staring at the empty space. "He-"

The Crucible shuddered again, and there was the crackling sound of loose electrical charges dancing among the shattered machinery. Fragments of machinery rained down on the TARDIS, fortunately too small to cause any damage.

"Time to go." Davros stated, and Ravon appeared beside him. As one, the four Eternals stared into the portal to Eternity, which seemed to glow brighter, bleeding light out into the Vault in a glorious liquid flood. "We'll bring the z-neutronium in after us, and use the power conversion to repair the breach."

"Wait, wait," Rose objected. "What about Caan?"

It was true; the stumpy form of Dalek Caan was still there. The Daleks who had abducted Dav had not included it in their circle. Its single blue eye stared blindly out at them, its tendrils barely wiggling.

"Leave it," the second Doctor snapped. "Let it die in space."

"But-"

"Forget it, Rose! There is no way that a Dalek, even one in that shape, can ever be allowed on the TARDIS. Ever!" The second Doctor leaned closer to her, and was suddenly cut off by the Doctor stepping between them. They glared at each other, identical faces equally hot with emotion.

"I," Dalek Caan groaned. Then it seemed to strain against the clamps and tubes that held it into its casing. "Davros, my creator. Take me with you."

"No," Davros replied, not taking his eyes from the light of Eternity. "Out of the question. That's not a reality you could survive in there. I'd need to translate you into normal space, and-"

"You did it for me," Donna said, raising her voice over the groaning of the time waves starting to shake the entire ship.

"That was very different," Davros snapped. He looked at Donna, and they shared a smile that spoke volumes.

(Esselle, currently standing behind Davros, took the occasion to mime exactly which female attributes Donna had and Caan did not, and both Jack and Mickey caught the joke and smirked.)

Caan was trying to move its casing, but the motors shuddered and faltered. Then it heaved itself upwards, and Rose could actually see a tube pop out of its side, letting loose a little stream of greenish-yellow blood or bile.

The Dalek spoke, its every word thick with sincerity. "Better to die...at the feet...of the true Davros...than to live...and serve the false one." It seemed to gather itself for one last supreme effort, every tentacle wild with motion. "Take me with you! Have pity!"

The four Eternals froze.

"Now he's done it," Ravon murmured. "He's said the P word."

"Nyder," Davros finally said, his gaze intent on the writhing mutant, "concentrate on the z-neutronium. Ravon, you will make a shield for Caan as it crosses over, and transport it to a Dalek crèche in normal space. Esselle, if you could do the honour of uplifting this little wretch?"

"Little wretch?" she said, raising one hand to her mouth. She bit one of her fingers, white teeth sinking through her glove, and then flicked her hand and sent a single drop of her blood soaring across the room, towards Caan.

The drop of Eternal blood had a magnetic pull like a planet. Every person present could feel the power held in that tiny red sphere; the answer to any question, the strength to move worlds. It was enough to draw their attention from the dissolving Crucible around them, and from the burning light rising up under their feet, as the z-neutronium boiled and geysered in its confinement.

The blood struck Caan, and it opened its eyes wide and screamed.

Its eyes! It had sprouted a second eye, somewhat asymmetrically placed near the first, and its spindly tentacles abruptly swelled with muscle. It was transforming, mutating before their eyes from a pitiful lump into something else.

"Oh now that's too precious," Esselle smiled. "It's growing a spine."

"Doctor!" Davros shouted, waving to the frightened figures gathered around the TARDIS. "Until we meet again, then?"

"What? What do you mean, until we meet again? You're just going to leave? Just vanish away? No last minute backstabbing or sinister plots or anything?" the Doctor spluttered.

"What for?" Davros smiled. "You are not my enemy, Doctor. Not really. And if there was revenge to be had, I would already have it."

Davros spread his hands out, glowing like the figure of a saint; beside him Nyder and Ravon flamed into coloured auras as well, red and black. Esselle was a multicoloured ripple behind them. He raised his voice to be heard over the sound of liquefying metal, and the wet popping of Caan tearing itself free from its casing.

"I have my revenge, Doctor. Because you turned your companions into weapons, just as Dav said. And I? I turned mine into gods."

He smiled, and the flaming light of the z-neutronium rose out of the myriad rents in the floor, making everything glow.

"I am free!" Caan whistled, and leapt from its casing, scuttling over the swiftly heating floor on new knobby legs. Esselle was suddenly there, standing in the gateway to Eternity, and she reached down and scooped it up in her hands.

"What a cutie!" she exclaimed, smiling at the palpating mass of tentacles and membranes as though it was an adorable puppy. "Give us a kiss."

The last thing the Doctor saw before he slammed the TARDIS door shut and shouted "Go, NOW!" was Davros' face, laughing.

Then there were more important things to think about.

The Doctor turned and fairly flew along the TARDIS walkway to the controls, where Jack and the others were already waiting. "No time to dematerialise," he panted. "Fly her out!"

The TARDIS rose, spinning, and hurled herself through one of the rifts in the Crucible's walls, and away. Behind her, the great remains of the star ship started to bulge and burn, as the z-neutronium at its heart somehow poured itself into a fine filament feeding itself into the gateway between worlds. It sizzled and snapped, and then it was gone, leaving the flagship of the Dalek fleet behind, like a broken skull tripped of flesh. It hung in space, hollow and abandoned.

The TARDIS was howling like a scalded child around them as the Doctor fought to get her to dematerialise. Jack and the second Doctor were on the controls now, and Donna as well, but the damage was too great, the time for repairs too short. The TARDIS had been wounded enough, moving into the Medusa Cluster and plunging into the core of the Crucible; now she struggled to break free, the waves of time buffeting her like a blue-glass bottle floating in an ocean of lava.

"Sarah Jane, hold that down! Martha, this, twist it, hard as you can, keep the tension up!" The Doctor's hands flickered over the controls, balancing, adjusting, but there was too much, no time, not enough power. He felt his hearts skip a beat in sudden horror: had he brought them all this far only to see them die before his eyes?

Donna's hands were flying over the console faster than a human's hands should, her face contorted with effort, sweat rolling down her forehead. She looked up, judged the shuddering rhythm of the TARDIS time rotor, and knew that it was not enough. They needed more power, and there was nowhere to get it.

Think, she told herself, think! You've just spent years doing nothing but train your mind, think!

"Mickey!" she shouted, as the entire ship pitched and nearly knocked her loose from the controls. She dug in with both hands, feeling nails crack. "Mickey, you have to get to the console!"

"What?" he shouted, from where he was splayed across the TARDIS roundels, flung there by the ship's movements.

"You have to get to the controls, Mickey, please! Sarah Jane, don't let go!"

It might be their only chance. Donna put the ship into a reverse spin, sending Mickey flying loose from the wall and quick-step-stumbling towards her.

"Donna, what are you doing?" the two Doctors shrieked as one.

"I don't know-" Mickey said, as his hands fell on the console and he exploded with white light.


	6. Doors

Light was pouring out of Mickey Smith, out of his eyes and smiling mouth, sinking into the TARDIS console. The Doctor took one step towards him, and then froze.

Because Sarah Jane was boiling over as well; not with light but rather darkness. Black smoke seemed to coil from her hair and fingers and stream into the TARDIS, and her eyes were locked on some glorious sight that none of them could see.

The light that flowed out of Mickey was white, but when it touched the console it changed, to crimson or emerald or deep glowing blue. There was a sort of pattern to it, a congruence between which controls it touched and what colour it turned. And with each change of colour there was a deep sound that was almost music, carolling out of nowhere, matched by the colours and chimes of the black smoke as it went into the TARDIS.

The Doctor stared, they all stared, as the energies combined, twined and boiled together, and started snaking through the console, rippling round the time rotor, lancing between contacts and switches, playfully fringing dials and knobs with coloured auras. There was a crisp string of popping noises, as various controls reset themselves.

The TARDIS shuddered, and thrummed, and hummed, and suddenly roared, as she flew out of the grasp of gravity and time and dove into the Vortex, sailing free.

There was a long moment while everyone who had been fighting the bucking of the ship found their balance again. Jack was standing next to Mickey, and he reached out a hand - and then drew it back, spitting. The touch of that white energy was worse than fire or acid; it burned without marks. The TARDIS seemed to be soaking it up without damage.

"It's all right," Mickey said; the energies flowing through him pulsed eerily with the movement of his mouth, puffing like smoke signals. "And I do this for the TARDIS, not for you, Doctor." He turned, his glowing eyes staring at Donna. "Not even for you."

Slowly, she nodded her head.

"And now I must go," Mickey intoned, and the white flood slowed and trickled away to nothing. He stood there, transfixed, hands locked to the console.

Sarah Jane turned her dark-shrouded face to him, and there was laughter in her words. "And where you lead, I shall surely follow. Sarah Jane, I am still in your debt."

The black energy streamed out of her, emptying out over the console, and vanished. The Doctor and his passengers stood frozen, waiting to see what they would do next.

"Wow," Mickey spoke first. "That was fantastic. I mean really, really fantastic!" He stared down at his hands as though he had never seen them before.

"That was - oh! You're all still here." Sarah Jane looked around at them, and asked a little more slowly, "How long was that for you?"

"Less than a minute," the Doctor said.

"It was - a lot longer for us."

"That was the Eternals," the Doctor said, his voice stunned. "Reaching into the TARDIS. Donna, what did you do? How did you - invoke the Eternals?"

Donna raised her eyebrows, offended. "I didn't. I guessed that they would be watching us off. But short of punching a hole through into the TARDIS, which they would never do, there was no way they could - they couldn't -"

She gestured with her hands in the air in front of her, as if drawing some impossibly complicated machine. "I don't have the words for it," she finally decided.

The Doctor suddenly gasped in shock, "The planets!" and slapped at the controls, bringing up new displays.

"They're fine, Doctor," Rose said, her eyes still fastened on Mickey and Sarah Jane. "That Eternal woman, she put them all back."

"She put them all back?"

"Yeah."

"Oh. Well…well… if Davros was going to infuse the TARDIS with his energy or whatever you want to call it, why didn't he use me? This is my ship," the Doctor asked Donna, sounding a little lost.

"Or me, for that matter," Jack said, and Donna looked at him with a less than impressed expression.

"Eternals can't just go reaching into reality through anyone, you know," she said dryly. "Most people would just burn away. But you, Mickey, and you Sarah Jane, you are, you are-"

She shook her head slowly, her newly white hairs sliding over her face.

"You are true," she finally said, raising her head and looking at them, stressing that last word. "True to yourselves, all the way down. There's no word for it, none that I can say anyway, but that's what it is. You are true, and because of this an Eternal can be - invited to work through you."

"Invited, what do you mean, invited?" the Doctor spluttered. "They didn't invite anything!"

"Yes, I did. OK?" Mickey raised one hand. "I grabbed the console, and it was like Davros was standing behind me, and saying that he could help, that he would help, but only if I let him. So I did."

"You. Let. Davros. Control my ship?" The Doctor's eyes were white-rimmed with rage.

"Yeah," Mickey snapped. "Since the alternative was letting her be shredded into time confetti."

"That's enough." The Doctor punched at the console with a trembling finger, and the TARDIS' lights dimmed to almost nothing, leaving all their faces bathed in the faintest green glow.

His voice was grim out of the darkness. "This ship is not going anywhere - we, are not going anywhere - until I figure out exactly what happened to you, Donna. To all of us. And that means the TARDIS doesn't come out of the Vortex until I am satisfied with all your answers."

A sudden yellow glow revealed Donna, one hand on the console and one on her hip, looking at the Doctor with a sad expression.

"So," she said, "We're your prisoners."

The dark seemed to fill with flinches at the word.

"I suppose you intend to confine anyone who can pilot the TARDIS, if you refuse to do so. That would be myself, your double, and Jack."

"Can we be in the same cell?" Jack suggested.

"And you'll want to confine Sarah Jane and Mickey as well." Donna touched another control, and just those two faces were haloed in light; Sarah Jane looked nervous, Mickey still looked strangely delighted.

"OK, now I definitely want the same cell." Jack grinned, then his grin faded when Donna looked at him.

"I am arguing for your life, Mr. Harkness," she said in a throttled tone. "The Doctor is threatening to keep us captive for the rest of our natural lives, which in your case could be a very, very long time."

"He wouldn't," Jack said, trying to prop his grin back up.

"He would."

"He did," Martha said out of the darkness, with a catch in her voice. "The Family, you locked them up till the end of time. You could do it to them - but they're not your enemies, Doctor."

"They could be." The Doctor glared, eyes huge in the gloom. "They could be the greatest danger the Universe has ever faced."

"Oh, don't be melodramatic," Donna scoffed. "It doesn't suit you."

The Doctor's mouth opened in a horrified O.

"I'm not a danger to anyone, and Sarah Jane and Mickey even less so. I'll try to explain what happened." She touched a dial, and the TARDIS interior lights came up.

Donna stood straight and slicked both her hands over her hair, pushing it back over her shoulders.

"All right," she said. "Here's what happened to me. The Doctor transferred excess regeneration energy into his own severed hand, and when I reached for that hand, I triggered a metacrisis. A two way metacrisis: the hand grew into a copy of the Doctor, using both our DNA: human body, Time Lord mind.

"But-" she held up her hand, "it was a two way metacrisis: the Doctor's mind imprinted itself on mine, parallel to my own thoughts and memories. The bolt of energy from Dav served to trigger a synaptic cascade, merging my human intuition and creativity with the Doctor's memories and mental capacity. And that's when the metacrisis began to destroy me."

"What?" Rose said, speaking for all of them.

Donna shook her head. "Time Lord mind in a human body - no, it could never last. I was going to burn out, my mind overloaded."

"Wait, doesn't that mean that you-?" Rose touched the arm of the second Doctor, the one in the blue suit, and he frowned at her.

"Of course not," he said, and she wondered if he was lying.

Donna went on. "Davros saw the metacrisis and its results in me, saw my death approaching, and decided that he would try to stabilise my mind. Save my life. So he - took me away. Into Eternity. And I spent a long, long time learning your mind, Doctor. Inside and out, backwards and forwards. But now it's done, and I'm completely safe."

"Safe? Hardly," the Doctor snapped. "And I suppose you shared everything in my mind with Davros, right? All that information - damn, Donna, you've betrayed me."

"No."

"You betrayed-"

"No, Doctor! Davros saw what you were going to do. You were the death that was approaching. You were going to remove my memories of you, leave your Time Lord knowledge dormant in my brain, in order to save my life. Save my life? Turn me back into that woman I was before I met you? How could you even contemplate that!"

"To save your life-"

Donna scowled, breathing hard. "I'm not goin' to say that life without you is not worth living, because that's stupid. You are a part of what I am today," she grinned for an instant, "more now that ever really, but that doesn't give you the right to delete parts of my brain!"

She shot a glance at Rose, and then back at the Doctor. He was leaning forward, both hands spread across the TARDIS console, staring at the controls and rubbing at the spot where an old weld had miraculously healed itself in the last few minutes.

"Sarah Jane, can you tell me what happened just now?" he asked softly.

She gave him a look that was half affection, half confusion. "I thought you knew about this sort of thing."

"Right now, I'm completely in the dark. Any light you could shed would be very, very appreciated."

Sarah Jane's face was bright with memory as she spoke.

"Well, I was here, working the controls like you told me to, Doctor, and then Esselle was here. Beside me, or behind me - I'm not quite sure. But she was here, and she saw, we saw, that the TARDIS needed more power. And she asked if I'd mind letting her use my body as the conduit. And when I said all right, she - it was like a river, but it was alive; every part of it was alive and complex and flowing with meaning, and it was going through me and into the TARDIS. And it was beautiful."

Sarah Jane smiled, and she was beautiful too.

"And then Esselle told me that because her energies were passing through me, that I might start experiencing time at a much slower rate, seeing reality the way she does. And she was concerned that I might be bored." She smiled, eyes wet. "And I don't think I can make you understand that, Doctor. I could - sense, some of what Esselle was. What an Eternal is. All that power and knowledge, and she was worried that I might be bored while she used me like a spigot to pour energy out of Eternity into this world!

"She said that if I wanted to, I could look at some of her memories, as a way to pass the time. And I said," she swallowed, "that I wanted to see that the Earth was safe."

She paused and licked her lips. Everyone listening was hanging rapt on her words, even the Doctor and his double were intent.

"And then I was in space. All the planets were around me, the Dalek fleet too. And the Earth was there, right in front of me. It - it didn't look any bigger than a cricket ball. And I reached out my hand, and I touched it."

She held out her hand, her fingers white in the dimness, cupped as though holding some priceless object, or some living thing.

"I touched the Earth. I could feel it: feel the weight of the continents and the mass of the oceans. I could feel the people on it, and the animals, and the plants and the plankton and everything! And I knew that I wasn't really touching it, with a real hand; I wasn't going to crush it, or anything horrid like that. The hand was just a symbol, a focus for an Eternal's power, I guess.

"And then I moved my hand. And the Earth moved. I felt it move, and I was so careful, so gentle, as I moved it. I felt where it had to go and I put it there, making certain it was spinning just right. And," she blinked hard for an instant, "it was all so complicated…I had to move the moon, because it had drifted out of orbit. And the ISS was completely turned round backwards, and good heavens, think of the story they'll have to tell…Earth and everything associated with it was adjusted and balanced and put right."

Sarah Jane stared at her own outstretched hand. "And then I looked - back, somehow, so very far, and I thought - or rather, she thought, 'Twenty six to go.'"

"She moved the Earth first," Martha said.

"Yes. It was - such a beautiful world. It is such a beautiful world."

"And how about you, Mickey?" The Doctor was not quite convinced that these two were not still somehow at risk of possession, and his voice was unnaturally sharp. "What did Davros show you?"

Mickey swallowed before he spoke. "I - you remember how angry Davros was about the damage to the walls between the dimensions? The damage that we did, me and Rose and Jackie, and the rest of us? Well, it was like Sarah Jane said: he started pourin' energy through me, and then said that I could look at some of his memories to pass the time." He gave a quick smile, bright and then gone. "He offered to show me some sex ones, but I said no thanks."

Jack could have kicked Mickey. What a thing to miss a shot at seeing! He couldn't even imagine…but Mickey was still speaking.

"So I said, show me the walls and what we did. And - he did."

Mickey closed his eyes, his face going smooth as stone. "I say that he showed me, but it wasn't just seeing. I don't think it was something that human eyes could see. It was like - like all the mountains of the world, and all the trees, and all the living things, and all the art and music and laughter were parts of one thing, and what he was showing me was all of that combined. Great - walls, or towers or rivers, of living gold or solid light, that moved and flowed and went through each other.

"Like in a cave, you know, those rock formations that take, oh, millions of years but you get stone that looks like lace or like curtains? That's what it was like. The walls around the Howling. And they were - they weren't just beautiful. They were beauty."

He squinted for an instant, furrowing his brow. "And I could see the Howling - a little. That was bad. Real bad. But there was worse."

Mickey opened his eyes and they were sad, deep and dark and sad. "So imagine you can see those golden walls, those perfect beautiful things around all the dimensions. And now imagine that there are these tiny - dots, smaller than insects, tiny little dots that are alive and that are punchin' through the walls, and whenever they go through they leave these, these holes. These foul, rotting holes, that stretch and leak and - they're just disgusting. They're an abomination, for real, and I never saw something that fitted the word as well as that until now. The holes were abomination, and I made them."

He looked at Rose and Jackie. "We made them. Well, I mean, we didn't do nearly as much damage as the Cybermen, or the Void Ship, but - it didn't matter to me, none. Every hole was like a needle in my eye; and in my heart too."

He dropped his head, and the light gleamed on his scalp through his close-cropped hair. "They were fixin' them, though. The Eternals. Fixing the holes, and pulling the Cybermen and the Daleks out of the Howling." He shrugged, glancing up uneasily. "They all went mad in there, screaming mad. Eternals are only taking them out because they might start pounding on the walls."

He scratched at his arms suddenly, a furious gesture with clawed fingers. "I feel - dirty."

"I'm sorry," Sarah Jane said, laying her hand on his arm to stop his scratching. "I wish-"

"No, no." He shook his head. "I'm glad that I know. Because now I know I'm going home and never, ever going to cross over again like that. I can't."

"That's up to the Doctor, isn't it?" Donna's voice was very quiet, but they all heard her. "Are you going to let us go home?"

"No," said the Doctor in blue.

"Yes," said the one in brown.

They turned and stared at one another, and the air seemed to sizzle between them.


	7. Freedom

"Can't you see?" the second Doctor finally hissed, stabbing at Donna with a finger. "Davros' weapon, his greatest weapon, is her: it's got to be her! All this stupid charade with stealing planets, gathering the companions, the Dalek that just happens to graze you instead of killing you outright: it's all part of the conspiracy!

"Everything that's happened has been to create her. Now she's been trained and controlled by Davros and placed in the TARDIS." His hair seemed to bristle with barely concealed rage. "And with her mind, and his will, and the TARDIS, the universe will fall. This universe, and all others, one by one."

"Lock her up. Lock all of us up if you have to, but you can't risk letting her loose, not for one moment!"

Donna silently mouthed a very bad phrase; even Jack with his wide-ranging experience of intergalactic slurs was impressed. Then she plastered a smile on her face.

"Don't you just hate it when people talk about you like you're not even there?" she finally said sweetly to the room in general. "Like, tellin' everyone that I'm some great super-weapon." She crossed her arms and her smile was touched with a smirk. "Of course, I'm not debatin' that I am super."

"What's the matter with you?" Rose said, staring at the second Doctor with puzzled eyes. "Don't you trust any of us at all?"

"Who trusts?" He said those words as though they were an absolute, something that could not be questioned; and his eyes widened as his audience shifted, moving a little way away from him.

"That sounds like something Davros would say," the Doctor finally said, slowly, painfully.

"He did," Donna chimed in. "Long ago, when he was hurt and frightened and alone and – oh. Oh!"

She pressed both of her palms to her temples. "Oh, I'm – I'm a fool. A blind selfish fool to -" She dropped her hands and looked up at the second Doctor, eyes suddenly sad. "All this time, I've been blabbing about what you gave me – but I never thought about what I gave you."

"What, the funny accent?" he jibed.

She shook her head. "That's not just what I gave you. I gave you – myself. All my human memories. The memories of a girl who was alone too often, of a woman who was afraid of being alone all her life. I gave you the thoughts and feelings of a human who was about to die, alone, all alone and afraid and not understanding. Me, Donna Noble. Dying here, with the TARDIS."

The second Doctor's forehead was creased in pain.

"I am alone," he gritted. "There's never been a human-Time Lord metacrisis, because there can't be. I am alone and – and I'm going to die. Alone."

He shot a look of pure hatred at the Doctor.

"No, don't look at him," Donna said, coming close and putting one hand on his shoulder. The second Doctor turned, violence in every line of his body, and she ignored that. She just looked at him.

"I gave you my life," she finally said. "And a death...and the knowledge that someday, you would die. But," she took his hand and pressed it to her chest, let him feel the beat of her single heart, "so will I. I will die, and so will Sarah Jane, and Mickey, and Martha, and Jackie. And Rose. All of us. And we don't spend our days before we die hating the world that's going to kill us, no. We love it, because it's going to give us death no matter what, and it's a great thing, the only thing, to get love out of it as well."

His lower lip trembled, and he looked about to cry. Donna stepped forward, touched her forehead to his, but it was Mickey who came close and took them both into one embrace. And then Jackie was there, Martha and Rose, Sarah Jane, and they all held onto him, onto each other, let the warmth of their human flesh surround him.

The Doctor watched, frozen, feeling a hard pain like steel through the core of him. And then suddenly there were arms around him as well; Jack behind him, embracing him, his cheek pressing against the Doctor's. The Doctor reached up, not looking, and cupped Jack's face in his hand, feeling the unforgettable sensation of immortal skin against his.

"I know," Jack whispered. "I know."

"I can't keep them," the Doctor said, his voice broken.

"I know."

* * *

The sun was bright again on Earth, and the children were playing, laughing, whooping and telling tales. Sarah Jane looked excited enough to start playing hopscotch herself.

"I have to get home to Luke, he's-"

"Sarah Jane." The Doctor cupped her arms with his hands. "Sarah, please listen."

"All right...."

"Your favour, from the Eternal. Use it – carefully. Remember: they are very whimsical. And not in a good way."

"I will. I'll save it for – for the end of days. The real end. Oh, but I do have to go, he's only fourteen and he's sure to be worried." Abruptly she twitched, a sort of jolt. "But…there's something you should know. About Esselle."

The Doctor's face did not freeze, but it seemed to slow suddenly. "What about her?" he asked neutrally.

"Well, when she was - reaching through me, and she told me about the distortion of the time rates, I caught a thought from her, just in passing, that she knew how boring it could be for a human, trying to interface with Eternal time. After all, she'd been human once."

"She thought that?"

"Yes. I - didn't even remember it, until just now." She tried to read his expression. "Is it - do you think that it's important?"

"It might be. It might be. Sarah Jane, thank you. Thank you for everything, and give your Luke my best."

"Oh, I will, I will. Bye!" and she dashed off, bright in the sunlight.

* * *

Jack and Martha asked to be dropped off together; which rather made sense. Martha was smiling, Jack was - thoughtful. The Doctor paused for an instant, to see if Jack's thoughts would rise to the surface.

"I asked Donna a question," Jack said, his face suddenly sad. "I asked her if she knew how I'd become immortal, since you wouldn't tell me."

"Oh. And?" The Doctor's upper lip drew a little back from his teeth.

"She wouldn't tell me either. Said that it would be stealing, basically: taking something that you didn't want me to have, and giving it to me. She did say that it was a mistake. And that the - person - who gave me immortality, didn't keep any for themselves. And she said that there might be an end for me."

"An end - no, Jack, I can't see how that's possible."

"She suggested that I pray."

Martha and the Doctor looked at him with expressions of shock.

"You are not going to pray to Davros," the Doctor said, his words an order. "He's not worth it. He's - he was, only a man."

"No, I'm not going to pray to Davros."

"Good."

"I'm going to pray to Ravon."

"What?" asked Martha; she hoped that the trauma of being captured by the Daleks hadn't unbalanced Jack mentally.

"Ravon?" the Doctor asked, eyebrows bristling with his frown. "Ravon?"

"Ravon. Over there, in his dimension, they call him the God of Blood – which means the living blood that is not shed in vain. The blood that runs in the limbs of children, the hearts of lovers, the minds of the wise. The God of honourable death, and glorious gestures. If anyone can give me an end, I'd - I wouldn't mind if it was a glorious and honourable one."

The Doctor's mouth twisted, and he suddenly stepped forward and hugged Jack, hard.

"You certainly have earned it," he said, voice muffled. "And I only wish that I could give you what you wanted."

Jack moved a little away, and smiled, and pressed his lips to the Doctor's face. "You have."

"You - take care of him, won't you Martha?" the Doctor entreated.

She laughed. "He doesn't need me to doctor for him."

They walked away, laughing, and the Doctor turned at a touch to his elbow. Somehow he was not surprised to see that it was Mickey, nor was he surprised when he said that he was staying here. Not going back with Rose.

"My Gran's gone," he said. "Died in her sleep. And Rose - she's got her own life, now. And maybe I can see - I don't know, something different for me."

He embraced the Doctor, quickly, and then backed off, smiling at him. "And if it weren't for you and Rose, I'd be a mechanic still. Fiddlin' around and not knowing what I wanted to do. Not knowing what I could do."

"And that is?"

"Anything, Doctor." He widened his eyes in a comical expression of gleeful madness. "Anything."

He laughed, and headed after Jack and Martha. The Doctor watched him go, and felt as though he was snapping a thread that held his hearts together.

Not yet, he thought. The thread wouldn't be cut until his next stop.

* * *

The doors of the TARDIS opened, and a fresh cool breeze came through, smelling of salt. A familiar smell.

Rose stepped outside, following her mother. She saw the long expanse of sands of Bad Wolf Bay, and opened her mouth to speak.

But there was no chance to say anything. Instead there were hot hands out of nowhere on her, dragging her away into sizzling blackness, the last sight the Doctor's face strangely doubled as he looked up to the sky and screamed.

And she screamed in answer, as the first blow came smashing down on her.


	8. The Howling

"Rose!" they screamed, Jackie and the Doctor and the second Doctor. "ROSE!"

A thunderclap was their answer, and a high impossible cry like tearing sheet metal that was also Rose's voice.

"What happened?" Donna shouted, half-running out of the TARDIS.

"Rose vanished," the Doctor spat. "Something grabbed her, as soon as she stepped out - of the TARDIS -" He turned and looked at Donna with horrified eyes.

Another thunderclap, in a clear sky; birds rose shrieking in protest from the sea. A scream that started as a woman's cry and then grew loud, impossibly loud, unbearably bestial, until the howl of a tortured wolf split the sky.

"What is that?" Donna yelled, trying to protect her ears with her hands.

"What did you do!" That was the second Doctor, striding closer to stare at her as though she was some poisonous insect. "What did you do to her!"

In answer, Donna pointed and yelled. They all turned and saw a terrible shining silhouette, towering over them like storm clouds lit by the sun: the outline of a woman with flaming hair, on her knees, hands raised against a blow: and a figure standing over her, holding in one hand what could only be a sword.

The thunder boomed and Jackie screamed. For an instant, the entire ocean seemed to be gleaming red, like blood. Rose's blood, she was suddenly terribly certain: Rose was going to die here screaming, and they would stand here helpless as she died.

The thunder slapped at them, faster and faster, every blow to their ears met by a scream from the sky, and then it stopped, and Rose Tyler collapsed to the ground in front of them, her back a sodden mass of blood. Fragments of pink cloth and blue leather spattered down around her like feathers.

"Oh no," Donna moaned. Then she shook herself. "Medical kit," she snapped, turning and running.

The Doctor and his double were kneeling besides Rose, holding her up, looking at her. Alive, she was alive, but her great dark eyes were red from crying.

"What…what was that?" she managed to gasp.

"WHO!" That was the second Doctor, rising to his feet, screaming up at the sky. "Who did this! Come out here and face me and I'll kill you for doing this to her!"

"And if he don't kill you I will!" Jackie shrieked, her eyes blazing, her face that of a Fury ready to slay anyone in her path with sheer rage.

Donna was back, opening a medical kit and holding it for the Doctor. He gave Rose a shot and then slicked gloves over his hands before starting to assess the damage.

"How bad is it, Doctor?" Jackie asked. Rose just kept panting through clenched teeth.

"Not so bad as - steriliser, Donna - not so bad as it looks." He waved a purple light over the rent flesh, pulled the rest of the jacket away and stared at the smooth white skin of her back, now crossed over with wet-smudged red lines.

He looked up at them, his own eyes wet, and said, "She's been whipped."

"Whipped. Whipped? I'll whip them, whoever did this!" Jackie raged, and then she turned and shouted "You!" with deep loathing.

They stood, Donna with the medical bag in her hands, the Doctor supporting Rose, and the second Doctor: they rose and stared at a shadow in front of them. A black shadow, with what might be straight hair to the shoulders, and broad hips.

A voice came from the shadow; the voice of Esselle. "I hope you will excuse my minimal presence; I am manifesting in this dimension through a puncture considerably smaller than a molecule, and I'd prefer not to open it any wider."

"What have you done to my Rose!" Jackie said, her voice with more than a little of the wolf in it.

"You can't do this, I mean, you can't have done this," Donna said, her brow furrowed. "You - the Eternals wouldn't break into this world, just to punish Rose, no matter what she did!"

A sigh out of nowhere; the shadow lightened and transformed into Esselle, pale and grim in her black uniform. She looked at them, opened her mouth to speak, and then vanished before as the large chunk of rock that Jackie was swinging at her head could make contact. The second Doctor grabbed her, and they wrestled for it.

Esselle spoke from nowhere, barely loud enough for them to hear. "I wasn't sent here to punish Rose Tyler. Davros sent me here to kill her."

They stared, struck again as though by thunder, as Esselle reappeared. There was a sword in her hands, they could see that now, lettered along the blade with pointy script, and wet with fresh red blood. She let the sword's tip drop onto the wet sand, and they heard the rasp of the grains of sand against it.

"Why?" said the Doctor, voicing their shared confusion in one word.

Esselle's stony face grew colder. "Davros was horrified at the damage that the Cult of Skaro did to the walls around the Howling, and nauseated at the Cybermen's damage. But when he found that one woman, one girl, had kept on punching holes through the walls, because she wanted to find a big strong man to solve her problems, even though she knew the damage it would cause, well, he really lost his temper."

"I needed-" and Rose was cut off by Esselle's voice, sharp as a knife.

"You did not need the Doctor, you little fool! You could have solved it! You could have defeated Dav and his Daleks by yourself! You don't have any idea of the sort of power that lies within you, do you?"

Esselle's lips were curled back in fury; then with a visible effort she relaxed.

"Well." She drew a figure in the sand with the tip of the sword, and it steamed. "Well, actually I should say, the power that did lie within you? Because it's gone now, Rose Tyler. The last of the Bad Wolf is beaten out of you, body and soul, and you will not be calling on those powers ever again. You will stay put, once and for all." She cut her eyes at the Doctor, and that glance cut as hard as iron. "Just as you wanted." Donna stiffened, seeming to read something in Esselle's glance.

"And now you're disobeying Davros by not killing her, aren't you?" Donna said. "What could make you do that?"

Esselle looked at Rose's pain-stained face almost meditatively, as though it was some abstract sculpture of pink skin and wet tears.

"Because once I lost the man who was the centre of my life, and I had to go on; and I know how much that hurts. And because Mickey Smith pled your case: that the Void Ship and the Cybermen had started the cascade of damage to the dimensions, and that your efforts were only to heal them."

She turned on one boot heel and faced Jackie. "And for you."

Jackie stared at her, wide-eyed. "Me?"

"Yes."

"I'm not going to kiss you in the future, or anything, am I?" Jackie sounded very worried at this prospect.

Esselle propped the sword against her hip, and then clasped her hands in front of her, her face serious.

"No, not so far as I can see. Another has spoken for you. Another has promised me her life, all her strengths and efforts and love, and in exchange asks only that I grant you a favour. I have granted it, by not taking your daughter's life."

"Another - who?" Jackie couldn't think of anyone who this Eternal person would know that would want to give her, Jackie Tyler, a favour.

"You know about the Daleks and the Cybermen being trapped in the Howling."

"Yeah, Mickey told us about it."

"Well, they did mostly go insane in there. We've been taking them out, translating them into normal space, down on a barren planet where they can't hurt anyone, but most of them just sit there. Their minds have burnt out by the Howling pouring through their senses until they were scoured away.

"But there was one Cyber unit that did not sit. It stood tall, and it remembered. It remembered that it had once had a name. It remembered that it had done its duty for Queen and Country. And it remembered a face. The last human face that it had ever seen with human eyes. Your face, Jackie Tyler."

"Queen and Country - oh. Her." Jackie swallowed in nausea, remembering a dim corridor lined with blood-flecked plastic, the scream of electric saws through bone and muscle, the feeling of cold metal hands holding her in place. "Her at Torchwood. Yvonne Hartman."

"Yvonne Hartman." Esselle smiled, and her eyes glowed as bright as the sky behind her for a heartbeat. "I saw your face in her mind, and I saw her name in your mind, and when I told that Cyber unit its human name, it remembered. It remembered being Yvonne Hartman. It started to come back to being a person, not just a metal drone. Would you like to see it?"

Esselle raised her sword, and sliced a silver curtain in the air with it. The silver condensed, seemed to crinkle like foil, and it formed a skeletal figure. Blunt armoured limbs, handled helmet - a Cyberman in shadow, faint silver lines drawn on air.

It spoke, its Cyber voice eerily melded with a woman's tone. "I did my duty for Queen and Country. I died for Queen and Country."

It crossed its metal arms on its chest, and fell to its knees in worship. Its helmeted head was cocked at a grotesque angle, craning up towards Esselle. "And I still serve my Queen."

She reached out one hand, and seemed to caress the helmeted head.

"And I accept your service," she whispered. "Go and learn yourself. I will always be there to help you."

The Cyberman vanished, and the second Doctor spat in disgust.

"You are obscene," he snarled at her puzzled expression. "Taking advantage of that poor woman, using her-"

"Healing her, rebuilding her body and mind and soul, for no more payment than her devotion; that is not a very exploitative relationship," she snapped, and frowned at him. "You have a talent for getting under an Eternal's skin."

"Thank you," he shot back.

"It was not a compliment." She turned again and faced Donna, and they looked at each other for a long, sweet, painful moment.

"Until we meet again," Donna said a little unsteadily.

Esselle nodded her head, and faded. Then she reappeared, eyes locked on the Doctor.

"And please be careful piloting back out of here," she said in a gritty voice. "Do not go wobbling off course in that erratic way of yours. The hole you punched to get in is large enough that even you can't miss it."

"What are you implying?'

"The TARDIS has many fine qualities, Doctor. She is loyal and strong, adaptable and honourable. But she is not, by any stretch of the imagination, svelte."

Esselle disappeared, leaving the Doctor to stare at where she had been and mutter to himself.

"Did she just call my TARDIS fat?" he finally beseeched the thin air, and got no reply.

Jackie had her arm around Rose's shoulders now, and her cell phone tight to her ear. "I'll call Pete, get an ambulance."

"Mum, I don't need an ambulance."

"You'll have scars for the rest of your life, we don't get you to hospital right now!"

"That's not what's going to scar me," she said, turning and stepping away from the Doctor. She stared up at him, and shivered at the sensation of blood trickling down her spine.

She had to say it, even though the words made her heart cry out. "You're going to leave me here, aren't you. Again."

The Doctor's face was tight with pain as well. "Yes," he managed to squeeze out. "Rose, I - if I stay here, the TARDIS dies."

"But if I go with you..."

Donna interrupted. "Rose. When Esselle said that you were to stay put, she meant it. She might disobey Davros once, but not twice. If you step foot outside Pete's World, if you leave this dimension, she will have your life."

Jackie's eyes widened, and she took Rose's hand in hers.

"And what about me?" the second Doctor asked, standing with one hip cocked just a shade too arrogantly.

Without words, the Doctor walked to him, reached as though to touch his face – and recoiled. Then, slowly, the other man's hands rose. They touched their hands together, palm to palm, and then very slowly leaned forward and pressed their foreheads together.

Rose's breath caught in her throat. There was – a sort of charge, flowing between them. It wasn't sex, and it wasn't love, but it was – connection, that was it. The connection between two nearly identical beings.

"Time Lord metacrisises never work out," the Doctor said, eyes closed.

The second Doctor's eyes were half-lidded, staring at something inside his mind. "Never do," he agreed. "They always end up tearing themselves to pieces, trying to become one being again – and failing."

There was a long, excruciatingly painful pause, and then the second Doctor pulled away. He stepped back, staring at the Doctor, and his fingers rose and touched his forehead.

"No," he said, his dark frightened eyes suddenly brightening with something that might have been hope. "No, you – you're leaving me here? Here, with Rose?"

The Doctor smiled, painfully, and nodded. "You said that you'd always be alone – well, you won't be. You said that you couldn't trust. I trust you with the most precious, the most wonderful person. I give her your life, and you – you do the same. Because she deserves it all."

"If I deserve it all, then I deserve you." Roe was still shivering, the wind cold through the rents in her clothes, but her heart was colder still. "I don't want some Xerox copy of the real thing!"

"He's better than real," Donna said, and both Doctors flinched at those words. "He has what I have: Time Lord knowledge and human creativity. There's nothing to stop him from becoming the greatest force this planet has ever seen. And it's up to you, Rose, to make sure that force is used for good."

"So – what? I'm supposed to, what, ride the Oncoming Storm, tame the lightning. I can't. I can't do that. I just want you, Doctor!" she accused.

"You can do it." Donna went to her and smiled sadly. Rose looked into her eyes and flinched, remembering the Doctor looking at her with that expression.

"You can do it because you have to," she went on. "You can do – almost anything, Rose Tyler. Believe me. I know."

"Thanks," Rose said, the words thick in her throat, Donna touched her fingers to her own lips and then to Rose's, in a brief almost-stylised gesture. Then she turned and went to the second Doctor, and Rose watched them, frowning, touching her mouth and wondering what that not-kiss had meant.

Donna stood and regarded the second Doctor, and her smile faded. They leaned towards each other – for a moment – only a moment- and then jerked back. The thought of sharing their minds was – too tempting, too dangerous.'

A crackling boom came from somewhere overhead, and they both glanced skyward.

"The walls are closing again," the Doctor said. "We can't stay. Donna..."

Donna waved one hand as though to silence the Doctor, and stared again at the man in front of her.

"I don't know what to say," she whispered. "You're like - a brother I never knew I had. A very angry brother, and I'm afraid, so afraid for you."

"You're afraid for me?" he said, puzzled.

"And of you, a little," she said, and then her shoulders slumped a hair. "I suppose if I said I had a gift for you, courtesy of Davros, that you would sorta hesitate to accept it?"

"Hesitate to accept?" His face suggested that he might in fact run at full speed from such a gift.

"It's this." She pulled her hand out of her pocket and showed him a small round stone that glowed with a thousand shades of green. Not the green of poison or neon, but the rippling hues of jungle and ocean and living things seemed to glow from her palm.

"I know what that is," he said, stunned. "It's a-"

"-soul regenerator," the Doctor finished, looking over her shoulder. He moved as though to touch it, then pulled away. "I saw one once, in a museum. It was dead, millennia dead. I've never seen one alive before."

"Well, the thing is, you've got my DNA, and the Doctor's mind, but you haven't got much of a soul right now. And souls are a lot more important that you ever realised. Which means that, well, things can go really, really wrong with you if you aren't careful. So if you want to live, and if you want to love, you'll take this. And keep it with you, until you're healed. And-"

Her fingers spread wide around the green stone in shock. "Of course," she whispered. "Rose will need this too. Didn't Esselle say that she had beaten the Bad Wolf out of her soul? Whatever sort of wound that left, this will heal it."

"I-" and the second Doctor choked. It was obvious that he wanted to say 'I don't want that,' but at the same time something in him was already stretching out towards it, like a plant reaching out for the sun.

"For both of you," she said, and pressed it into his hand. Rose had come close to watch; she reached out and placed her hand over his, and he felt wetness on his skin. He turned her hand over and saw the bloody tracks of her fingernails in her palms, from when she had clenched her fists in pain and rage at Esselle's attack. That memory made him - and he held the stone and breathed, breathed, breathed, trying to relax, trying to calm the wrath in his single heart.

He finally opened his eyes and gazed at the Doctor and Donna, and said too casually, "Goodbye, sister. Goodbye," a long pause, "brother. I - I'll think of you. Lots."

"And take care of Rose?" the Doctor said.

"For all my life."

There was nothing left to say. The Doctor and Donna stepped into the TARDIS, and with a rattling wheeze the blue box vanished away. Forever.


	9. The Mountain

The Doctor stood at the TARDIS controls, thinking as hard as he ever had in his life. Donna had disappeared into the vessel's corridors, but he was not following her, not yet. Some part of him trusted her enough to let her move unsupervised on his ship.

Another part of his mind told him that he was an idiot to trust her. That he should drop her into a stasis capsule, cryogenic suspension, anything. And another part anguished at the prospect of taking his memories from her mind - could he even do that now? After all this time? Take - what had she said - seventeen years away from her? More?

Donna returned, carrying a folding wooden chair under each arm. She didn't seem to need any help, so the Doctor just watched her as she set them up, facing each other and parallel to the control panel.

She sat down in one, and spread her hands over her knees in a quick flicking gesture, and waited.

And waited a little longer.

"Well?" she finally asked.

"Well what?" he said, watching her carefully.

She snorted amusement. "Well, we both know you're dying to take a look inside this new brain of mine. So come over here and see."

The Doctor eased closer, thinking, could he-?

"Sit," and he did, facing her. She reached out and took his hand, and planted it on the console, next to the oscillation overthruster.

"One hand on the console," she said, placing her hand there as well. She reached out with her free hand and touched his face, pressed fingertips to his temple, even as his own hand did the same. They were a mirror image, arms, crossed, and then the mirror rippled into a thousand quicksilver fragments and they were -

Inside. They seemed to hover in a vague greyness, like a fog, and things like mountains or elephants, shapes great and high, could be felt pressing blindly against them in the gloom.

"Where are we?" the Doctor wondered.

"Between," Donna said softly. "Our neural impressions are overlapping, just a little. So if we went that way," she pointed behind the Doctor, "we'd end up in your mind. But - you know what's in there."

She held out her hand, and after a long moment he took it.

"Come and see," she invited him, and they walked.

Suddenly their feet rang on steel. They were in a tunnel. He looked down on armour plating and glowing conduits; he looked overhead and saw ivory and stone arches like the throat of a great whale, but instead of baleen hanging in that great throat, the ceiling was alive with weapons. Energy cannon with legs crawled about, great black shadows fringed with thorns slithered, and blinding points of light flared and froze and flared again.

"What is all that?" he said, not taking his gaze from the ceiling.

"Defences. What, you don't think I realise that I've got a huge great gob of Time Lord knowledge in my head? There's any number of races that would trade their spines for that information. So I built these, to protect me, sleeping or waking."

The Doctor kept staring upwards. Up at the mirrors with eyes of acid, and the hovering bundles of fangs, and the-

"Come on already, you'll be here forever if you keep counting them. Come on!" She tugged at his hand, and they walked on, a little faster than was quite decorous.

The long armoured tunnel grew darker, and darker, and the Doctor's hearts grew dark as well. If this was what was inside of Donna's mind...but it probably meant that his fears of her being abducted or mind-stripped were baseless.

And then in one step, everything changed.

They were on a mountain. A high mountain, dark slate-grey stone under his feet. The air was clear and cold and the sun was hot on his back, and he looked up to see the faintest fleecing of clouds in a sky so blue it hurt the eye.

Donna was standing in front of him, hands clasped in front of her like an eager student showing off her latest project. Her hair burned like a flame, tossed by a brief breeze. "Here you are."

"I - I don't quite get this," the Doctor said, slowly turning on his heel. There was no sign of the tunnel, or of anything that reminded him of the mindscapes he was familiar with. "This is your mind?"

"No, your mind."

"My mind?"

"Your mind."

"Where?"

And she laughed, the wonderful galloping laugh that he remembered, and she laughed, "You're standin' on it!"

The Doctor looked down at the stone beneath his feet. He could sense it, sunk deep into the stony earth, its roots going down into the depths. But it was also - complexity, it was shapes and sounds, smells and memories. The grey of the stone was like thousands upon thousands of lines of overlapping text, or millions of interlaced music scores, or layers of living circuitry.

It was his mind. His mind, armoured and encapsulated in Donna's mind.

"All right," he said, gingerly shifting his weight. "Then - Donna, where are you?"

"Me?" She laughed again, and spread her arms wide. "I'm everything else, Doctor. I'm the wind, I'm the clouds, I'm the sky, I'm the sun and the moon and the stars. All together, all a part of one thing. You're one hell of a mountain, Doctor, but I'm on top!"

She did a little dance of victory, her feet flashing against the stone.

"And you – did this?" He gestured at the empty space around them. Not empty space though: all of this, these skies, the other mountains, the clouds – all part of a single mind, a mental construct that would put most others in the universe to shame. "All of this – with Davros?"

"There's something a little – off – about the way you say 'with Davros,' you know," she pointed out. "A little too much emphasis on the phrase, don't you think?"

"That man – that thing is evil, the closest thing to pure evil I have ever met." The Doctor could feel the old rage rising in him. "I can't believe that he could do anything good. That he could have you in his power for even one hour without destroying you."

He suddenly realised how much he was upsetting his companion: her own teeth were clenched, muscles standing out in her neck with fury.

"Oi! You just shut up, you," Donna seethed. "You know nothing - nothing! - of what Davros could accomplish. Because you only ever met him as a crazy old man, in constant pain, and terribly alone. Think about him, think about all he did in the state he was in, at the brink of death with every breath, and then imagine what sort of a universe he could make.

"He did – he did everything for me. He saved my life, again and again, when I was about to die from ignorance or fear or pain or just about to go up like a broken gas main. He devoted hours and days and months and years to me – just to me! Just to one little human me! Because he thought I was worth it."

"I – I'm sorry Donna, it's," he breathed heavily, consciously letting go of his anger, "look, I'm sorry. It's just, I feel like we're talking about Davros' reflection or something. His – his good twin from another dimension!"

"Oh, no," she said. "No, he wasn't the good twin, no. He was – the different twin. Wait, hang on, let's sit down."

Two soft white leather recliners faded into existence, sitting at an angle to each other. Donna sat down and the Doctor did as well, a little gingerly.

Donna pushed the footrest out and stretched, and the Doctor wanted to do just the same, just to stretch, just to relax – but he couldn't. Not until he know what had happened to Donna.

"The universe of the Eternal Davros is – well, I didn't see a whole lot of it, you know? I spent the first two years in hospital."

"Hospital?"

She laughed, pressing her head back against the chair. "Yes, there was this poor administrator, Doctor Inf, and he was furious when I showed up. Said that Eternals had no business hangin' around where doctors were working, because if something went really wrong, instead of using their brains, the doctors would just pray for a miracle."

The Doctor blinked. "He did sort of have a point there, didn't he?"

"Yeah, well, the point is, the whole time he was ranting at the foot of my bed, Esselle was behind him with a mop, going over the floor. When he finally turned round and noticed her I thought he'd faint! An Eternal, mopping the floor...But then she stood up with her mop and made it clear that the Eternals were going to be in this room, working with me, and not anywhere else. And that anyone praying for a miracle was going to get their prayers answered with a boot in the arse – possibly hers."

"These Eternals take sort of a hands-on approach to their worshippers, don't they?"

"Or foot-on, yeah. But that world, that universe – it's a world where there is – not no war, but so much less than there is here. Because any time two races start gettin' ready to brawl, the Daleks show up, and they start to critique."

"Critique?"

"You bet! 'Your cannon placement is sub-optimal' and 'You have abandoned diplomatic solutions too quickly' and on and on, it's really funny when you think about it. And if they can manage to brush off the Daleks' words, then the Daleks tell 'em, go ahead. Go ahead and fight. But we fight the winners."

The Doctor swallowed. "Yeah, I can see how that would be a deterrent...But why, Donna?" The Doctor leaned forward. "Why would Davros change the world, change the universe, into anything but some crazed distortion of Skaro itself?"

"Because," Donna tapped her finger with one chin, looking thoughtful, then smiled at him.

"Because it's fun," she said simply. "Because he can see what the universe would be like if he controlled every planet, every race, and it's damn dull. Much more fun just to let everything rattle along on its own, with just the occasional clean-up when some species gets much too big for its britches."

"But now Dav - the half-Davros - is free in this universe, with the Daleks determined that he rebuild them."

Donna snorted. "Well, good luck on that. That's gonna take him a long, long time. Because what the Daleks saw in Eternity was Eternal Daleks. And Daleks do not rise to Eternity by being ruthless or vicious, or by killing. There is only one way they rise, and that's by greatness of heart."

"Daleks don't have hearts, they have circulatory flagella," he noted.

"Yeah, well, I know that. You know what I mean." She shook her head in exasperation, rubbing at her temples. "What allows a Dalek to become an Eternal, to become what these Daleks saw as bein' a perfect Dalek, is something - spiritual. And poor old Dav is going to have a long, hard road to roll before he figures that out. But when he does…well, that should be really something special."

"So all this time, the man I thought was Davros – wasn't?"

"Well," Donna leaned a little closer to him, "No, I think that was the real Davros, the real one in this universe at least."

"I met Davros before, obviously. And Ravon and Nyder, on Skaro once. But – who is Esselle?" He'd never even seen a Kaled female.

Donna smiled, her throat quivering for a moment in laughter. "She's Nyder's typist."

"She's his what?" he replied, baffled.

"A temp, Doctor. She's a temp, that's all. Brought into the Bunker on Skaro to help type up interrogation reports. And she just – stayed. Made herself useful, helped Nyder in every way that he would accept help, helped Davros too, and all the while she was turning things, just a hair, just enough to change them – enough to change everything. Without her, Davros would never have transferred into a new body. Without her – they would never have translated into Eternity."

"And she was a temp?"

"Fastest typist on Skaro, I reckon," she beamed. "She started as a temp, and wound up an Eternal. Which just goes to show you that there's no point in underestimatin' the hired help."

"She wasn't just a temp, is what you are saying."

She leaned closer to him, touched her finger to her lips in a shushing gesture, and then extended her arm until her finger brushed his lips.

"Not for you to know – or to look, Doctor. No, she was a lot more than just a temp. She knew what she was getting into, right from the start. Before the start, even. But believe me, Doctor, you try to track her down and you'll hit a time lock so cold you'll shatter. They have done what they have done, Doctor. Raised the Daleks and the Kaleds to Eternity. Even thinking too loudly about what they have done could have – consequences."

"Oh yes," he imitated her in his deepest doomiest voice, "very serious consequences – oh come on Donna, you know that's just going to tempt me, now don't you?"

"I know you." She spread out her hands, palms flat over the stone that was his mind. "You'd have gone and looked, unless I warned you. This way at least I can warn you."

The Doctor looked at his feet, scuffed one foot against the stone. He had thought that a metacrisis would be an abomination, a monster doomed to burn out in instants; and instead he found Donna, whole and balanced and perfect. She knew everything he knew, and everything she was, and combined they were – she was -

"Donna Noble, I can't imagine anyone that I'd rather have as my companion."

"Yes you can," she countered. "Rose."

"Yes, but…but…"

"Doctor." She reached out and squeezed his hands between hers, and he was a little startled to feel them still human warm. "No. I'm going home. To Earth."

"But why? What could I … what could I say to make you stay?"

"Doctor," she ran her fingers through his forelock, "no, there's nothing you can say. I've grown – too apart from you. Seventeen years – and at the same time I've grown much, much too close to you. I – having me with you would end up with us both going mad, I think, talking to each other only about our shared memories until our minds wore away like chalk."

"But - Donna, could you be happy there? On Earth? One world, one tiny pre-spaceflight world?"

"Yes." She said that with some of that same clear untroubled look she had given him, when Davros had first brought her back. "Very happy. I love Earth, and I want to see it again. I want to see my mum, and my granddad, and tell them that I love them too. I want to make some money - not a fortune, but enough so that they'll be taken care of, no matter what. And then," she smiled and her eyes stared into the distance, seeing something bright and beautiful, "and then I'm going to change the world. For the better. I know it."

"You know," the Doctor cleared his throat, "you know that there's no history of Earth where Donna Noble rules the world."

She rolled her eyes. "Oh, please. What a lot of bother that would be. I'd spend all my time tellin' people what to do, and chasin' them down when they disobeyed me. No, I don't want to rule the world. I just want to move it a bit in the right direction, you know? Give it a little shove? Like pinball?"

The Doctor regretfully put aside the image of Donna Noble tilting the planet on her pelvis, and only said, "You're too young for pinball."

"Never. Besides, I've spent how much time flying around in this living pinball machine of yours?"

The Doctor's mouth opened wide. "The TARDIS is not a pinball machine!"


	10. Earth

They were back on Earth. Around them was still the signs of celebration; revellers in the distance shouting with joy. There was confetti stuck to their feet, and the sharp smell of fireworks muffled by the rain.

The Doctor and Donna stood on a darkened street, looking at a little Earth house. Perfectly normal, and inside it would be Donna's mother and Wilf, so worried, so anxious to see her...

But they still stood, and waited, watching as the moment slipped past them and away. The moment when Donna could change her mind and come back to the TARDIS slowly dimmed and became, inevitably, the moment of them saying goodbye instead.

"You look," she reached out and touched his cheek, damp from the rain, feeling the little bristle of his sideburn under her fingers. "You look like you could use a good cry."

The Doctor slumped, hands deep in his pockets, and just looked at her.

"Not for me," she amended. "But – I could give you one. It's not – not the bad sort of cry, really. I think it would do you a universe of good."

His mouth twisted a little, and then he managed to press out a smile.

"Maybe you're right."

"Well," Donna shook her head, letting the raindrops fly, "Eternity isn't heaven, you know. But it's sort of an – adjoining territory. There's a wall between eternity – and – some other place, where only the greatest go. And the Eternals know that, because they see them go through: the great of heart and spirit from all races. And when someone goes to that wall, and passes through, they never, ever come back."

She was trembling inside, knowing what she was about to tell him, knowing perfectly well how it would feel. "But y'see, sometimes? When people come to the wall, they leave a message, for those who might be coming after them. About, oh, waiting for people, or hoping to see them soon." She tilted her head to one side. "I couldn't really – look at the wall. Even the Eternals keep their distance from it. But I could see a – projection, of a copy, of a memory of the wall. And there was a message there. For you."

Her tears spilled over, as she leaned over and whispered the message into the Doctor's ear. Four words. And when she leaned back, his eyes were overflowing.

"Oh," he said, and then he couldn't say anything else but, "oh."

"You're welcome," she choked out.

He turned, and with quick steps went to the TARDIS, opened her doors, went to the control panel and took off, pressed his forehead to the control panel and bawled.

He cried: great lashings of tears that hurt like actual blows on his flesh. But she was right, she was so right, that most perfect Donna Noble, truly named: it hurt, and it was right, and it was what he needed.

He went on, through the Vortex, and cried.

* * *

Donna waited outside, listening to the last throbs of the departing TARDIS, wondering when she would see him again. See them, really. And when Wilf's hand came down on her shoulder, she turned to him with a smile.

"What's this, love, why are you crying?" he said.

She hugged him hard, and went inside with him, and explained in a few words about the wall, and the messages on it.

"And you gave the Doctor his message then? Was it – something private?"

"Oh, no. It was – written on the wall into Heaven, wasn't it? For everyone to see? And it wasn't very long, either. Just four words."

She swallowed, and rubbed her eyes with the back of her hand.

"Jamie sends his love."

And then she sobbed as well, sobbed and Wilf and her mother held her, and it was right.

* * *

She came home. She came back to gray pavements and blue skies, yellow sunlight and green grass fighting to grow. Back home. She embraced her family, all of them, hard.

She stayed in touch with the Doctor's other companions. Sarah Jane and her bright laughter; Martha and Mickey (she was the first to notice how they seemed to pay attention to each other when the three of them met, and she smiled inside and left a little early, to give them time to talk). And when she couldn't meet people face to face, she was always ready to phone them.

She was talking to Jack one day, and suddenly noticed how laboured his breathing was. He didn't sound ill, though.

"Jack," she stopped walking and ducked her face against her phone, lowering her voice, "what are you doing?"

"What do you think," he purred. "I'm praying."

"Oh, right." Praying to the God of Blood, of course, in the most literally hydraulic method available. "Most people pray with both hands, you know."

"Well, I could put you on speaker."

"Mr. Harkness."

She could almost hear him straighten at her tone. "Yes, ma'am?"

"I want you to get your hand out of your pants, finish this conversation and hang up. And then, then....then I want you to call me at home. Tonight. Elevenses. You see, Wilf has a webcam now."

"Ah." A world of promise in that sound. "Be seeing you, then."

* * *

"Just look at this," Donna's new boss said, furiously waving a newspaper under her nose too fast to read. "Just look at it!"

The rest of the staff bent their heads over their computers or their sewing machines and looked busy. It was a bridal shop, and Donna had been hired to help them adapt a notoriously balky new software package to their needs. And while she'd been at it, she'd made a few suggestions.

"You did this," he blustered on. "You told Annette to add this little concealed pocket to the dress, and then you hid a fiver in it! A fiver! And now this bride's in the paper, blathering that we give free money away!"

Donna took the paper out of her boss' shivering hands, and read it at a glance. The bride's car had broken down, and the chauffeur's phone hadn't been working, but she had found the fiver and hailed a cab and made it to the church on time. Just like in the songs.

She looked up at her boss with a smile. "She is in the paper, that's right. One hundred percent right. In fact, she's got the entire page to herself, and I must say, the dress looks great from that angle - really does a wonder for that chest of hers, don't it? - and there's the name of your shop."

"And?" he sneered.

"And you've just got yourself a full-page advert in this paper, very near the front, for a fiver. And considering who she's married to, it's likely to be picked up by the wire services."

He took back the paper, and read the name of the groom, and gulped.

"Would you like me stop by the bank on the way back from lunch, and get some crisp new bills?" she suggested sweetly.

"That," he ground his teeth. "that won't be necessary."

He went back to his desk, but by the end of the week he was convinced: the shop was booked solid with orders, copies of the photo had gone round the world, and there was even talk of a news report for the telly.

Donna was perfectly happy not to take credit, even while the seamstresses told her she was knocking herself down.

"If it keeps one bride from havin' to run round asking passing strangers for help," she said smoothly, packing up her desk on the last day, "it'll be worth it."

So Donna went on to her next job, and the next one. Nothing permanent, not yet, but she invested some of her salary into certain stocks, and rolled some of those earnings over into other long-term investments. She wrote a book about money management that didn't sell very well (she ended up releasing it for free on the Web, and made more off tips than she had in royalties), and a rather smutty fantasy novel that made ten times that.

She frightened her mother, sometimes: when she found her daughter typing faster than the eyes could follow, or suggesting they buy some knick-knack in a curio shop that turned out to be a valuable antique - and then Donna would slow down, take some time off between jobs, spend times just talking and gossiping and laughing.

Wilf was never frightened of her, and she loved him for it.

Then she got a very interesting inquiry….

* * *

"A think tank," said Mr. Cley, "is only as good as its glass is clear. Don't you agree, Miss Noble?"

Donna blinked at him, tall and perfectly dressed, his grey hair starkly outlined by the sunlight. He was the brightest thing in the ultra-slick, ultra-expensive office in a very expensive London building. Except for herself, of course, in a very nicely cut suit with just a hint of red in it to bring out her hair.

"Clear as in transparency of operations, processes, results? Everything out in the open, ready for review?" That would be the ideal, of course.

"Exactly. Exactly. Without the light, the whole system breaks down. But instead of murky water, you get murky minds. People following some cherished idea over and over again, hashing it down until it's useless, and blotting out any new ones. People who spend their time bickering instead of actually getting work done.

"I'm a very wealthy man, and I've devoted a portion of my wealth to setting up think tanks all over the world, to nourish new ideas. Their successes have been steady, but as they mature, they seem to stagnate. They need to be looked over, shaken up."

Donna twitched one eyebrow (the old Donna would have raised both). "Wash the windows?"

He narrowed his eyes at her. "Pretty much, yes. You're just the sort of person they won't be expecting."

"And what makes you think that I can keep up with all these bottled-up thinkers of yours?"

He tilted his head. "I read your money book – it's clear that you have a good analytical mind. You have some very interesting recommendations in your resume. And I have other information sources as well."

If he was willing to admit that, then she was practically as good as hired. She decided to try just a tiny push back for information.

"Were there any other reasons, Mr. Cley?"

He stood and went to the window, looking out at it; the sunlight made the lines in his face look deeper, but only increased his overall aura of strength.

"Do you believe in dreams?"

"As in dreams being real? No." Psychic projections, maybe. Visions of other futures, other pasts – were not really dreams, now were they?

"I think of them as random number producers. A boil of images in our heads every night, which we can use as a mirror, bouncing our thoughts off in other directions...I dreamed of a red bird, and everywhere the bird went there was a little feather, that burst into flame. And the fire didn't consume, it gave light."

Donna kept her face in its standard that's-interesting expression, but inside she was sending a very rude thought at a certain white-clad Eternal who seemed to delight in sending her these little presents from afar. Still.

Still.

But it was the job of her dreams, really. Travel the world, meet new and exciting minds, influence them, guide them, show them how much higher they could fly.

Change the world, for the better.


End file.
